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Originally Posted by WestAustinite
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This is a great summary of a frustratingly difficult topic given the different definitions in different countries. To be clear, the administrative definition is also tough in China specifically - I lived there for many years and opened a business there. I had to deal with the various administrative districts as a part of the process.
Chongqing is a prime example. While its "administrative district" is the size of Austria, so they say, that is because the district is essentially on par with the provinces. The same is true for Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and a few others, I believe. In a typical city (i.e., not one of these mega mega-cities), let's use the example of the tiny village of Nanjing (pop. ~8 million or ~11 million depending on who you believe). Nanjing is in a province (省) - specifically Jiangsu - but it is a prefecture (市). That prefecture includes several counties (县) and development zones/districts (区), which are usually, essentially, at the same level as county, and within those you may have various villages/townships (乡), etc. I always considered the development zones/districts as suburbs to the downtown core given that most of these were fairly developed as well. Counties often included a swath of rural areas.
One of the cities we lived in for many years had a prefecture level population of 1.3 million (small town by China standards), but that included four counties and a special district (five unique zones). The main urban area of what we would call a city was probably around 600K-700K at the time - likely larger now because they were experiencing some significant growth and were getting HSR and major highway connectivity.
That said, if we were to consider metropolitan areas in the U.S., often made up of several cities and counties, that might be a fair comparison. Any way you shake it, Chinese cities will win by population nearly every time. But the definitions make it uber complicated.
In that chart, the Urban Area and Metropolitan lists seem more reasonable to me...but of course, that's just, like, my opinion, man.
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