Statistically, China does not have a simple concept of metropolitan areas. In the country's long-term development plan, China's regional economic layout and planning include large areas such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Bohai Economic Rim; smaller areas include the Chengdu-Chongqing Economic Circle, the Wuhan Metropolitan Area, and the Greater Changsha Metropolitan Region. Even smaller areas include the Shanghai Pudong New Area,Tianjin Binhai New Area, Sichuan Tianfu New Area, Chongqing Liangjiang New Area, Hunan Xiangjiang New Area, Shaanxi Xixian New Area, Guangzhou Nansha New Area, and Hebei Xiong'an New Area. This is an industrial layout and national long-term development plan formed after decades of industrialization. However, only administrative divisions above the county level regularly publish social and economic development indicators.
As one of the types of administrative divisions in China, cities includes three categories: municipalities, prefecture-level cities, and county-level cities. In addition, China's two special administrative regions are highly commercialized and densely populated areas in the world. Both the international and Chinese governments classify them as cities. In terms of area, prefecture-level cities and municipalities are comparable, and the population and economic sizes are not much different, belonging to the same order of magnitude. There are no county-level cities in municipalities, which is the biggest difference between municipalities and prefecture-level cities in administrative divisions. Mostly, a China's county-level city has all been reformed and developed from a county as a whole, but the development focus, policies authorized by the central and provincial governments, and authorized development plan are different from that of a county. Based on this, this entry only includes China's prefecture-level cities, municipalities and special administrative regions. If you want to fully understand the economic level of prefecture-level administrative regions, you must refer to list of prefecture-level divisions of China by GDP.
The GDP indicators included in this entry are all based on nominal GDP at current price. The converted US dollar GDP data is calculated based on the annual average exchange rate announced by the Chinese government (NBS) that year. The IMF publishes the purchasing power parity index of various currencies based on the average purchasing power of the US dollar in the United States and the average purchasing power of various currencies in the local area. It is adjusted twice a year, and the data varies greatly each time. The purchasing power parity of the GDP indicator is no longer included in the entry.
Methodology
A county-level city is itself a type of administrative divisions of a prefecture-level city. Compared with prefecture-level cities, the economic size and population size of a county-level city are not on the same order of magnitude. Including China's county-level cities and prefecture-level cities in the same set of comparative data is like including U.S. states and U.S. counties in the same set of data for comparison. In fact, they are not comparable. This entry does not include GDP of a county-level city.
According to the level of economic development in 2024, only Chinese cities with a total GDP of more than 100 billion US dollars are included. The unit of measurement for the data listed is the local currency Chinese yuan. In order to facilitate international comparison, the local currency is converted into US dollars, and the purchasing power parity (int'l dollar) indicators change too frequently and cannot be used as the main reference. All GDP data are officially released by the cities. This entry currently contains GDP data for 2023 and 2024, of which the 2023 GDP is revised based on the results of the fifth national economic census in 2023.
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