List of cities in China


List of cities

List of districts
List of prefectures
List of counties
List of township-level divisions

According to the administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China including Hong Kong and Macau, there are three levels of cities, namely provincial-level, prefecture-level cities, and county-level cities. As of June 2020 the PRC has a total of 687 cities: 4 municipalities, 2 SARs, 293 prefectural-level cities and 388 county-level cities not including any cities in the alleged claimed of Taiwan.
Four cities are centrally administered municipalities, which include dense urban areas, suburbs, and large rural areas: Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin.
According to 2017 research from the Demographia research group, there are 102 cities controlled by People's Republic of China with an "urban area" population of over 1 million.

List of cities

Contemporary cities

;Types of cities

Renamed cities

Dissolved cities

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. 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.
It is the general consensus that four cities, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, belong to the first tier, while tier II includes other major cities. Small and medium cities are grouped into tier III or IV.

Republic of China (1912–1949)

;Fu cities
CityChineseProvinceAdministration period
Nanjing南京府Nanjing1914-1927
Shuntian順天府 Shuntian1914-1921

;Shi cities