What are the real populations of Chinese cities? On mistakes in city border defi nition and data interpretation in popular internet sources

Abstract

Economic growth and intensive metropolisation processes in the PRC have increased interest in information on the size of the country’s cities. Chinese institutions apply population data to administrative units which is considerably larger than its urban area. The publicly available data are often divergent; according to Gibson & Li (2017) hundreds of studies in economics misinterpret China’s subnational population and over 80% of articles use these data erroneously. Few specialists are able to use data directly from original Chinese sources (see Chan, 2007; Chan & Wan, 2017), most of them use publicly available sources. Scientists and other users often have at their disposal estimates published by international institutions. A comparative analysis of those data exposes marked dissimilarities. The article is to identify differences between particular sources and to establish their causes. I assume that the reason for the discrepancy in the assessment of the city's population is not a difference in method of defining the city, but rather the fact that the authors of the studies do not apply established criteria and do not provide accurate calculations. Finally, guidelines are created that, if followed, should result in smaller discrepancies between data published by various sources.