According to the administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China, there are three levels of cities: provincial-level cities (consisting of municipalities ), prefecture-level cities, and county-level cities. As of January 2024, the PRC has a total of 707 cities: 4 municipalities, 2 SARs, 293 prefectural-level cities (including the 15 sub-provincial cities) and 408 county-level cities (including the 38 sub-prefectural cities and 12 XXPC cities). This list does not include any cities in the disputed Taiwan Province and portions of Fujian Province, which are claimed by the PRC under the One China Policy, as these areas are controlled by the Republic of China (see the List of cities in Taiwan). Prefecture-level cities nearly always contain multiple counties (县), county-level cities, and other such sub-divisions. Because of this, prefecture-level cities often overlap in area with county-level cities. Four cities are centrally administered municipalities, which include dense urban areas, suburbs, and large rural areas: Chongqing (32.05 million ), Shanghai (24.87 million ), Beijing (21.89 million ), and Tianjin (13.87 million ). According to 2017 research from the Demographia research group, there are 102 cities governed by the People's Republic of China with an "urban area" population of over 1 million.

List of cities

Contemporary cities

Types of cities

Renamed cities

Dissolved cities

Tier system

The Chinese central government introduced a ranking system in the 1980s to facilitate the staged rollout of infrastructure and urban development throughout the country. Cities were ranked by tier according to the government's development priorities. The tier system began as a bureaucratic classification, but has since the later 1990s acquired new salience from the perspectives of real estate development, commercial vitality and cosmopolitanness, besides the old notions of population, economic size, and political ranking. It has now become a proxy for demographic and social segmentation in China, especially relevant to those college-educated seeking non-governmental employment. It is the general consensus that four cities, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, belong to the first tier, while tier II includes other major cities. Small and medium cities are grouped into tier III or IV.

Republic of China (1912–1949)