How do they define a "city" in China?
sloan-dandy,
Sun, 07/19/2009 - 01:58
It's hard to figure out a Chinese city. It seems many of these cities aren't really cities. They're more like counties or states, with a lot of rural areas thrown in. But then there are "real" cities, with some of them carrying same names as the larger areas in which they're located. Isn't this terribly confusing? You think you're traveling to a city, quite clear on that, while in fact there may be two entities that are quite different from each other.
CTA Editor on Sun, 07/19/2009 - 14:48.
Yes, this can be rather confusing. Generally, regional administration has the levels of province, prefecture, county, township, and villages. As of 2009, there are 34 province-level administrative units, including 23 provinces (including Taiwan, which China considers a province); 4 provincial-level cities (biggest cities in the country, directly managed by the central government - Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing); 5 autonomous regions (provinces so-called because of the large minority groups living in them); and 2 special districts of administration (Hong Kong and Macao).
So, in terms of the cities in China, the four cities mentioned above are the most important, ranked equal with provinces. Other cities in China are also graded, accorded status such as "prefecture-level city" or "county-level city." Classifications like these matter in terms of budgeting, tax-collection, etc.
To average persons, of course, a city is just a city. And here is the thing: a city in China is often more than a city, in that a city in China is an administrative unity that comprises not only an urban area but also a surrounding rural area that is far larger than what can normally be called suburbs. For decades now, the Chinese government, eager in its effort to modernize China, has pursued a policy of urbanization, and one basic idea in the endeavor is to make an urban core the economic power-house of a given region. So what could have simply prefectures or counties were made "cities," with one actual city administrating a region far larger than itself. So, nowadays people can still talk about traveling to Ningbo City, referring to the actual city whereas officially Ningbo City is an area of some 9,000 square kilometers.
Let's continue to use Ningbo as an example. Ningbo City, a prefecture-level administration, is in charge of 6 districts, 3 county-level cities, and 2 counties. Essentially, the six districts form the urban core and its suburbs, what we can narrowly call "Ningbo" whereas the other cities and counties form the outlying area of Ningbo. So, when people say they're traveling to Ningbo, most likely that they going to visit Ningbo the actual city; it may also mean, however, that he will actually to visit a city that is a couple of kilometers away from Ningbo the real city.