One of the fascinating insights from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order is that since economic development occurred so rapidly in East Asia its cities lack the historic charm of European urban areas. The reason being that the organic accrual of construction and history over more than a century of economic development simply did not occur in much of East Asia. The modern nation-state of China is the most extreme case of this (of course one issue is that historically East Asians have used more perishable materials in construction, and not emphasized the importance of the permanence of great public buildings).
A photo essay in The Guardian, The great leap upward: China’s Pearl River Delta, then and now, illustrates this with images of rapid change in urban areas. But that reminded me to do something I’d been meaning to get to: compare the size of urban areas in China to those in the United States and Europe.
Below is a table I constructed of metropolitan regions. The data are from Wikipedia and I selected the administrative classifications which seemed the most equivalent. Using a cut-off of 5 million inhabitants you can see China has many more metropolitan areas than the United States already. I know an decent amount of Chinese geography for a foreigner, but I don’t even recognize 7 of the 22 metropolitan areas!
| China | USA | Europe | |||
| population | population | population | |||
| Shanghai | 24500000 | New York City | 20153634 | Ruhr | 13400000 |
| Beijing | 21500000 | Los Angles | 13310447 | Istanbul | 11400000 |
| Guangzhou | 20800654 | Chicago | 9512999 | Paris | 11200000 |
| Chongqing | 18384000 | Dallas-Forth Worth | 7233323 | Milan | 8247125 |
| Chengdu | 17677122 | Houston | 6772470 | London | 8200000 |
| Tianjin | 15500000 | Washington DC | 6131977 | Amsterdam | 7500000 |
| Shenzhen | 12357938 | Philadelphia | 6070500 | Munich | 6100000 |
| Harbin | 12000000 | Miami | 6066387 | Berlin | 6000000 |
| Wuhan | 10670000 | Atlanta | 5789700 | Madrid | 5600000 |
| Suzhou | 10349090 | Frankfurt | 5600000 | ||
| Hangzhou | 9018000 | ||||
| Xi’an | 8627500 | ||||
| Shenyang | 8255921 | ||||
| Dongguan | 8220937 | ||||
| Nanjing | 8216000 | ||||
| Foshan | 7197394 | ||||
| Jinan | 7067900 | ||||
| Wenzhou | 6642592 | ||||
| Qingdao | 6188100 | ||||
| Quanzhou | 6107475 | ||||
| Shantou | 5346708 | ||||
| Changsha | 5288800 |