Abstract: Within the context of globalization and integration, regional cooperation has long been an important approach against the fierce competition across the world, during which local governments tend to play a vital role. Taking the accessible travel circle as a case, we investigate the driving mechanisms of regional cooperation as well as behavioral logics of local governments in the Yangtze River Delta by employing the game-theoretic approach. The findings suggest that local governments prefer to compete rather than cooperate with each other in the early age of regional integration, which might be resulted from their neglect of benefit increase and from excessively focus on the cost of cooperation. While with the continuous decline of tourism industries as well as the acceleration of globalization, cooperation among cities and regions becomes an important tool to cope with global competition. Yet various institutional divisions are still major barriers of regional cooperation in China. Thus market rules should be the primary principle of regional cooperation. And we also argue that the balance between benefits and costs of all gamers or stake holders is an essential issue for a successful cooperation, which can be enhanced by the regional identity in both terms of government and the public. Finally, we conclude that these successful experiences and enlightenments in the Yangtze River Delta will not only result in a fuller understanding of the regional integration in transitional China, but also contribute a lot to the cooperation among local governments in other metropolitan regions. In terms of the integration in Guangdong- Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, we suggest that the central state government should establish a new “centralized system” by the way of cross-border government coalitions or coordination meetings on the one hand, and give full play to the comparative advantages of regions with three different contexts and make full use of the market mechanism in the allocation of resources on the other. The former is a top-down mechanism that may be effective for formal integration among governments, and the latter is a bottom-up one that can help to promote the informal communication of citizens.

Key words: cooperation among governments, tourism cooperation, the Yangtze River Delta, accessible travel circle, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area