China now has more than 100 cities of over 1 million residents, a number that is likely to double in the next decade. Chinese cities often administer sizeable rural areas beyond the city centre and surrounding suburbs, and the Chinese word for city – shì or 市 – is typically used to describe a sub-provincial region. Another issue is that Chinese cities are growing so large that it has become difficult to determine where one begins and another ends. The resulting megacity will have a combined population of more than 100 million, and cover an area twice the size of South Korea. Guardian Cities is dedicating a week to the huge but often unreported cities on the front line of China’s unprecedented urbanisation.

Source: The Guardian March 20, 2017 06:00 UTC