Resource information
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate
substantially exceeded China's population growth, which
averaged 1.4 percent annually between 1978 and 2009, and
real GDP per capita accordingly grew at 8.6 percent annually
during this period. China's urban population resides
primarily in city districts (shiqu) and town districts
(zhenqu), which constitute the urban core of larger
administrative units called cities (shi) and respectively
towns (zhen). Cities and towns in China are expansive
regions, with administrative territories much larger than in
the rest of the world (Chan 2007). Cities are conceptually
equivalent to counties in the U.S. and thus the whole of
China's territory is basically covered by 287
prefecture and provincial level municipalities, which within
their area include 654 city districts - the cities proper in
the conventional sense of this word - and 19,322 towns. Each
town in turn includes a town district - an urban core that
occupies a fraction of the town's area but accounts for
most of the town's urban population. While cities and
towns as a whole overlap in their administrative boundaries,
with multiple towns nested within each city, city districts
and town districts are disjoint structures, being urban
embryos within the administrative boundaries of
territorially larger cities and towns. The main purpose of
this study is to examine the development and features of
town districts (zhenqu) - the urbanized core of China's towns.
