Abstract: Urbanization and employment are both key issues in China's current socioeconomic development; it is of practical significance to fully understand the interaction between these two key aspects of development for the purpose of facilitating a healthy and orderly transition of the Chinese economy and society. Using the Chenery model, existing studies have explored the interrelationship between urbanization level and non-agricultural employment in China but relatively little attention was paid to the issue of data quality. Therefore, based on a thorough understanding of statistic caliber changes in China's urban population and employment statistics, this paper used the data from the fifth census, the sixth census and relevant statistical yearbooks and employs the Moran's I index to investigate the spatial characteristics of urbanization and non-agricultural employment growth of prefecture- level administrative divisions of China; it also uses the geographically weighted regression (GWR) method to analyze the relationship between these two factors. The main conclusions are as follows. (1) Both China's urbanization and non- agricultural employment experienced considerable development during 2000- 2010, with urban population and non- agricultural employment increased by 13.46% and 14.18%, respectively; the growth was mainly distributed in the southeastern part of the country, with megacities leading the absolute growth and cities around megacities showing a faster relative growth. (2) The Moran's I index reveals that the spatial distribution of China's urbanization and non-agricultural employment growth show a polarized trend, and they have similar spatial distribution patterns; three regions had both high urbanization rate and high non-agricultural employment growth: the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Area. Meanwhile, Tibet, Qinghai Province, Gansu Province, western Inner Mongolia and parts of Northeast China had both low urbanization rate and low non-agricultural employment development. (3) There was a significant positive spatial autocorrelation in China's urbanization and non-agricultural employment growth and spatial econometric models are needed to analyze their relationship. GWR was employed to reflect the regional differences of non- agricultural employment growth in promoting urbanization. By classifying the correlation coefficient the types of relationship between urbanization and non-agricultural employment growth of different regions can be determined. Urbanization and non-agricultural employment development are well coordinated in most parts of China. But Qinghai Province, the eastern part of Gansu Province and central Sichuan Basin show a trend of under- urbanization; Chongqing Municipality and its surrounding areas, Xinjiang and some provincial capital cities show a trend of over-urbanization. Thus, local governments should adopt different development policies that are in line with local conditions in promoting the development of urbanization and employment growth.

Key words: China, GWR, non-agriculture employment, spatial pattern, urbanization