A Comprehensive Evaluation on the Performances of China’s Information Technology Characteristic Towns Utilizing the Advantage-Oriented Competitive Evaluation (ACE) Method

The characteristic town (CT, or Te Se Xiao Zhen in Chinese) program is among the most important drivers of China’s new urbanization. However, the program aroused countrywide concerns about its rapid elevation, excessive real estate construction, high investment risk, and severe construction homogenization. Despite the policy’s rapid dissemination, there needs to be a theoretical basis and practical guidance for the local government to evaluate CT candidates to ensure the feasibility and sustainability of this novel urbanization practice. Moreover, simply employing traditional evaluation techniques, such as TOPSIS or analytical hierarchical process, may overwhelmingly stress inherited advantages of existing towns and easily overlook the potential candidates in the policy’s early implementation. Thus, the current study employs a novel advantage-oriented competitive evaluation (ACE) approach, which values the comparative advantages of the evaluated objects, to rate the performance of fifteen information technology characteristic towns (ITCTs) comprehensively. The presented work constructs a three-level performance index system based on public statistics, comprehensively evaluates the ITCTs’ performance, and reveals each CT’s unique advantages. The analysis and discussion disclose the evaluated ITCTs’ development status, highlighting the blooming development against public concerns and the ITCTs’ clustering based on unique comparative advantages. The evaluation results also verify that the ACE is an excellent comprehensive evaluation approach that can reveal an object’s comparative advantages from varying facets and depths. Finally, this work briefly concludes the emerging issues of ITCTs’ construction, the limitations of ACE evaluation, and suggestions for future research.