Evolution of China's intercity venture capital network: Preferential attachment vs. path dependence

China's venture capital (VC) industry has experienced rapid growth over the past two decades and plays an increasingly important role in economic growth. Although venture capital firms (VCF) have local bias, intercity VC investment has a growing proportion and is gradually forming a nationwide network. Preferential attachment is an important mechanism in the evolutionary process of networks, while path dependence in evolutionary economic geography provides another perspective for the spatial distribution of economic activities. As for intercity VC networks, which is more important: preferential attachment or path dependence? To answer this question, this study designed three scenarios to simulate the evolution of China's intercity VC network and then validated the simulations through the index of quadratic assignment procedure and comparison of spatial distribution. The first and second scenarios included only the single effects of preferential attachment and path dependence, respectively, while the third combined both effects. The results show that both preferential attachment and path dependence significantly affected intercity VC networks. Moreover, the combination of the two mechanisms could better simulate the network structures. Compared with path dependence, preferential attachment has presented better simulation performance since 2008, indicating a more important role in the network evolution.