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Newgeographys A Guide to Chinas Rising Urban Areas lists the Middle Kingdoms 20 largest cities and provides a brief description of the 16 youve likely never heard of. Beloware the top 10.

To put this list in perspective, the 20th largest Chinese city – Taiyuan – is slightly larger than our 3rd largest city, Chicago (pop 2.8 million). New York (pop 8.4 million) would be 6th and LA (pop 3.8 million) 13th on this list.

My favorite on the list is Shenzhen, Chinas 2nd largest city. I first visited Shenzhen in the late 1980s. It had been named a special economic zone a few years earlier, but in the late 80s it felt more like a fishing village than a city. The population at that time was around 100,000 (yes, 100k).

The size, scale and rapid population growth of Chinas cities is hard to comprehend. We simply have nothing in the U.S. to compare this to.

And its not just China. For the first time in history, more than half of worlds population lives inurban environmentsand each day about 180,000 people move to a city. By 2020 there will be more than 20 global megacities, each teeming with more than 10 million residents.

Urbanization is changing how the world lives and works, and is covered in more detail in the Intuit 2020 Report.

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