The national central city is not only the nation's economic center, but also an important carrier for international competition. By establishing an evaluation index system on the functions of national central cities, this paper employs the method of principal component analysis to evaluate and grade the city functions in 1992, 1998, 2006, and 2010. It adopts the spatial expression and spatial interpolation methods to study the spatial- temporal evolution of the city's competitiveness. The evaluation results are expected to reveal the features...