Number of Chinese cities with over 1M urban population reaches 93

A bird's-eye view of Shenzhen. /CFP

With China's fast urbanization, more people are flowing into urban areas. According to official data, a total of 93 cities have had their urban population reach one million. The number of such cities increased over four times in 40 years.

As the second and third biggest provinces in terms of GDP ranking, Jiangsu and Shandong provinces each have ten cities that have over one million urban people. But compared with Jiangsu, no city in Shandong has its population reaching six million.

Guangdong, the largest economic province, ranks third with eight cities home to one million urbanites each. Seven of them are in the Pearl River Delta, the largest urban area in the world in both size and population, according to the World Bank.

Experts say the reason why the number in Guangdong is less that of Jiangsu and Shandong is that the economic gap between different regions in the province: The province has two megacities – Guangzhou and Shenzhen – which not only gravitated people from other cities to the two megacities but also attracted huge population from other provinces. The total population of the two metropolises has reached nearly 28 million. 

According to data released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban‑Rural Development, there are currently six megacities with an urban population of more than 10 million, ten large cities with an urban population between five to 10 million, and 14 cities with a population between three and five million.

By the end of 2019, China's urbanization rate has reached 60 percent.