Fact of the Day: Chinese Cities with Populations Over 1 Million

For many of us in the West, a city with a population of over one million is considered pretty big, as towns may only have a few thousand people.

But in China, what may be considered a town already has over a million people in it. And according to Demographia, there are some 60 of them in the Middle Kingdom, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing.

For example it says Beijing has a population of 12.4 million, but most statistics say 17 million. That's because it is calculating the urban area population, and there are still a few million out in the rural areas. Demographia's definition of urban area population is "a continuously built up landmass of urban development", or "the lighted area that can be observed from an airplane at night".

Using these numbers, Chinfographics has come up with an interesting visual presentation of of all these Chinese cities, contrasted with other metropolises like New York (21.3 million), Paris (10.5 million), Sydney (3.7 million) and Amsterdam (1.1 million).

Of course omitting people in rural areas would probably bump up the Chinese numbers significantly and there would most certainly be more than 60 cities.

In any event, 60 or more cities in China with more than one million people is mind-boggling.