List of cities in the People's Republic of China

China Administrative divisions list
List of cities (all types) List of districts
List of prefectures (all types)
List of counties (all types)
List of township-level divisions

According to the administrative divisions of China including Hong Kong and Macau, there are three level of cities, namely provincial-level (consists of municipalities and SARs), prefectural-level cities, and county-level cities. As of June 2016 the PRC has a total of 665 cities: 4 municipalities, 2 SARs, 293 prefectural-level cities (including the 15 sub-provincial cities) and 366 county-level cities (including the 10 sub-prefectural cities and 9 XXPC cities) not including any cities in the claimed province of Taiwan.

Based on 2010 census data, the largest cities are the four centrally administered municipalities, which include dense urban areas, suburbs, and large rural areas: Chongqing (28.84 million), Shanghai (23.01 million), Beijing (19.61 million), and Tianjin (12.93 million). There are 105 cities with over 1 million people in the metropolitan area as of 2015 and is the only country to have that many cities with over 1 million people in the metropolitan area as of 2015. [1]

The Chinese central government introduced a ranking system in the 1980s to facilitate the staged rollout of infrastructure and urban development throughout the country. Cities were ranked by tier according to the government's development priorities. The tier system began as a bureaucratic classification, but has since the later 1990s acquired new salience from the perspectives of real estate development, commercial vitality and cosmopolitanness, besides the old notions of population, economic size, and political ranking. It has now become a proxy for demographic and social segmentation in China, especially relevant to those college-educated seeking non-governmental employment.

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