List of cities in China

Map of China's cities

  Municipality

  Special administrative region

  Prefecture-level city

  County-level city

  County-level city subordinate to a Prefecture-level city

According to the administrative divisions of China including Hong Kong and Macau, there are three levels of cities, namely provincial-level^[1] (consists of municipalities and SARs^[2]), prefectural-level cities, and county-level cities. As of June 2018 the PRC has a total of 675 cities: 4 municipalities, 2 SARs, 294 prefectural-level cities (including the 15 sub-provincial cities) and 375 county-level cities (including the 38 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 102 Chinese cities with an "urban area" population of over 1 million, according to the Demo Graphic Research Group in 2017.^[3]

Tier system

See article: Chinese city tier system.

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.^[4] 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.^[5][6]

• "Tier I cities include Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Tianjin, Nanjing, Chongqing, Xi'an, Changsha, Qingdao, Shenyang, Dalian, Xiamen, Suzhou, Ningbo, and Wuxi;^[7]
• Tier II cities include Beihai, Changchun, Fuzhou, Guiyang, Haikou, Harbin, Hefei, Huhhot, Jinan, Kunming, Lanzhou, Nanchang, Nanning, Sanya, Shijiazhuang, Taiyuan, Urumqi, Wenzhou, Yinchuan, and Zhengzhou;
• other small and medium cities are grouped into Tier III or IV cities."^[8]

People's Republic of China (from 1949)