Is prefecture-level city a “city” in China: a critical review

ABSTRACT

The definition and boundaries of cities often determine how research is undertaken due to the areal units used to provide geo-located data and thus affect the research findings. Prefecture-level cities are popular city-equivalent statistical units in China, particularly in studies of inter-city mobility. Most prefecture-level cities in China have been delineated as meso-scale administrative divisions for territorial governance through various approaches of administrative annexation. This study takes a critical look at the city definition in China and summarizes two critical challenges that emerge when prefecture-level cities are adopted as city-equivalent statistical units. The first challenge is that the population and other socioeconomic statistics of different prefecture-level cities are incomparable since a large amount of land administered by such cities is functionally rural. The second challenge is that, because prefecture-level cities cannot represent the real functional areas that are based on a daily labor-shed concept, the estimation of inter-city mobility could be largely erroneous by conflating the real inter-city travel with the de facto intra-metropolitan travel such as daily commuting. While the first challenge has long been addressed by scholars and eventually by the national government of China in 2008, the second challenge remains to be solved. These two challenges demand rigorous attempts to delineate cities in China considering integrated economic and social units. This study sheds light on how delineation of administrative boundaries affects our understanding of city hierarchy and spatial interactions. Its implications are not limited to China but applicable to other countries and regions.

KEYWORDS:

• City definition
• prefecture-level city
• inter-city mobility
• functional area
• urban China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As for county-level cities, they were once important city-equivalent administrative units in China before the city-administer-county system was implemented in a nationwide manner in the early 1980s. Since then, many county-level cities have been annexed into their affiliated prefecture-level (or above) cities as urban districts. As a result, not all the prefecture-level cities contain county-level cities. Only a limited number of urban settlements are located in county-level cities. This is the reason why county-level cities are much less widely used as city-equivalent administrative units in China than the prefecture-level cities.

2. Since the early 1990s, local governments of Chinese cities have planned and built many development zones and parks (e.g. “industrial parks”) in suburban areas to attract investments. These developments led to considerably rapid employment growth in the manufacturing sector in suburban areas. Such growth resulted in numerous self-contained industrial new towns within the prefecture-level cities, with workers residing in worker dormitories or private-rental housing in nearby urban villages.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation of Guangdong Province [2023A1515011389]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [41971408]; Chan To-Haan Endowed Professorship Fund of the University of Hong Kong [HKU-207060183]; General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grant Council [17614320].