text: Provincial level spatial inequality One notable feature of the urban structure was the spatial imbalance. The early 1950s witnessed a decrease in spatial inequality as the party endeavored to close the gap of income among different regions. For example, the party built most of the industrial plants, under the Soviet help, in inland areas instead of coastal areas, and the former treaty ports were not prioritized in the First five-year plan. Such efforts to level spatial inequality continued during the Great Leap Forward, but the regional inequality persisted. Compared with the 1952 provincial ranking, the richest provinces maintained their top rankings in 1964, while the poorest stayed at the bottom.
  Spatial disparities among regions persisted from 1963 onward. Particularly, provinces with higher industrial investment rates and better-established industrial bases had the fastest growth rates. Many of these provinces' advantages came from history. Examples are Liaoning, the city formerly under Japanese colonial rule, and Shanghai, the city with an exceptional economic foundation in the nineteenth century. Even with the party's effort to bridge the developmental gap through the Third Front investment and the Down to the Countryside Movement, regional economic disparity continued.
  There are two general trends from 1963 to 1978. First, regional disparities overall increased. Variation in GDP per capita for all jurisdictions increased from 0.71 to 0.99. Beijing and Shanghai grew more than two times than western provinces. Second, if excluding the large cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Liaoning) from the calculation, variation in GDP per capita decreased from 0.36 to 0.26. Although still substantial by 1978, spatial disparity among the remaining provinces improved. Growth rates of many inland provinces which benefitted from rural industrialization and the Third Front Construction, such as Gansu, Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia, exceeded the average.