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China is the world's largest producer and consumer of pork, and the production and circulation of hog has a crucial impact on people's daily life. However, due to restrictions in environment and industrial policies, hog price fluctuation presents significant regional differences, and the range and causes of fluctuation in hog prices in different regions are significantly different (Zuo, Cai, & Tan, 2016; Chen, et al.,2011). Meanwhile, with the deepening coordinated development of regional economy and reduced costs in commodity circulation, price fluctuation in different regions is not isolated, but presents linkage characteristics in space to some extent (Sun, Zong & Qiao, 2016; Liu & Pang, 2018). What kind of provincial linkage in hog price and how can we simulate the network structure of provincial price linkage to help our nation formulate regional regulation and control policies have become questions worth discussion.
At present, the conduction analysis on the fluctuation of hog price in China is mainly focused on the conduction between upper and lower reaches in price fluctuation, and time series method is adopted in most researches, such as Johansen Cointegration Test, Granger causality Test, finite distributed lag model, VEC model for linear relation study on price conduction (Dong, Xu, Li, & Li,2011; Jia, Yang, & Qin,2013). Other scholars adopted asymmetric error correction models (Mensah-Bonsu et al., 2011; Bhardwaj et al., 2012) and threshold autoregressive models (Rezitis & Reziti, 2011; Acquah, 2012) on the linear relation in price conduction of pork industry chain and its price conduction characteristics are also asymmetric (Pan & Li, 2015; Wang, 2017). However, there are few studies on the characteristics of horizontal conduction of hog price. The research results by Tian (2010) showed that, the hog price in China was mainly conducted from producing area to sales area. Wang (2017) applied synchronous coefficient to measure the regional coordination in hog price fluctuation and found that, fluctuations in hog prices showed strong co-movement among provinces and regions. The emerging producing areas in live pig market take the lead in price fluctuation, main sales areas and main producing areas are the price-affected parties (Wang, Wang, & Li, 2018).