How can we assess the ‘actual’ number of Chinese cities, and how can we explain the deliberate omission of the vast majority of small and medium-sized cities in most studies on urban China? Is this anomaly merely a result of research methodology? Is there a genuine uniqueness to the Chinese urban system? In an article published on the Cybergeo Conversation Blog, affiliated with the journal Cybergeo, Denise Pumain, Emeritus Professor and member of the Geographie-cités research unit, analyses how this anomaly could be explained by a set of peculiarities in Chinese urbanisation.
Given that the scientific literature reports an insufficient number of cities in China, Denise Pumain attempts to explain the origins of this anomaly by examining four possible sources of peculiarities in Chinese urbanisation. She demonstrates that it is possible to obtain more realistic estimates of the number of cities by using Chinese data sources, and she cites a number of recent articles that are beginning to move in this direction. Thus, the use of harmonised data bases could help to restore comparability between urbanisation in China and that in other regions of the world.
The large quantity of missing urban units appear when comparing two maps extracted from Elfie Swerts’s PhD (2013) representing the population of the some 9,000 Chinese cities on figure 1a and of 695 cities only that she classified according to 32 employment categories in 2000 on figure 1b.
Denise Pumain (2 juin 2026). The Hidden Number of Chinese Cities. cybergeo conversation
