Appendix A: PRC's Administrative Division System and Regional Division

A. Administrative Division into Districts

Over time, the PRC has developed an administrative system that recognizes four levels of districts: the province level (including provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities), the prefecture level (including cities at prefecture level), the county level (including counties, autonomous counties, and cities at the county level, as well as districts under the jurisdiction of cities), and the township level.

Province-level districts are commonly used as geographical units in regional disparity analysis. Researchers often choose this level for their analysis because the geographical coverage and population distribution in the provinces are relatively stable and, more importantly, because each province has a Bureau of Statistics and datasets. After the foundation of the PRC, 29 provincial districts were established by the end of 1957, including the three municipalities of Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. In 1988, Hainan district, which had belonged to Guangdong province, was upgraded to be Hainan province. Chongqing, which had belonged to Sichuan province, became a fourth municipality in 1997. At the end of 2005, there were 31 provinces in the PRC. These provinces had an average population of 41.0 million and an average GDP of 590 billion yuan (about 72 billion dollars calculated by that year's exchange rate).

Each province-level district is composed of about 12 prefecture-level districts (in 2005, besides municipalities, there were 333 prefecture-level districts in the country). The average population of each prefecture was about 3.2 million in 2005, and the average GDP was 46 billion yuan, which equals 5.6 billion dollars calculated by that year's exchange rate.

Prefecture-level districts include a number of county-level districts. There are 2,862 countylevel districts, about 7 in each prefecture. In 2005, each county had about 450 thousand people and a GDP of 6.4 billion yuan, which is equal to 0.78 billion dollars.

B. Regional Division

Among the PRC's 31 provinces, there are significant differences in natural environment, population, social structure, science and technology, and economic development. We usually assign the 31 provinces into several regions as the basic outline of policymaking and related analysis.

Hu Hanyong Line. In 1935, a Chinese geographer, Hu Huanyong (1935), identified a borderline to differentiate population density. This was illustrated in his book, Population Distribution in China. The line started from Heihe, Heilongjiang Province, extended to the southwest, and ended in Tengchong, Yunnan Province (Figure A-1 [ PDF 266.1KB | 1 page ]). He stated that on the land southeast of this line, which accounted for a mere 36% of the total national land area, 96% of the national population was living. Meanwhile, northwest of the line, the other 64% of the total land was occupied by only 4% of the national population. This borderline is referred to as the “Hu Hanyong Line;” it has been applied broadly as a regional division method in the analysis of population, geography, and ecology.

Coastal vs. Inland Regions. From 1949 to 1986, coastal and inland regions were commonly differentiated in economy planning and statistical analysis (Figure A-2 [ PDF 266.1KB | 1 page ]). This division is similar to the Hu Huanyong Line. It divides the PRC's 31 provinces into two regions: coastal and inland. The coastal region includes 11 provinces: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Hebei, Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong (including Hainan), Guangxi.

Eastern, Central, and Western Areas. From 1986 to 2005, the division of eastern, central, and western areas was dominant in research on regional disparities in the PRC. In the “Seventh-Five Year Plan,” the State Planning Committee divided as the PRC into three regions: eastern, central, and western (Figure A-3 [ PDF 307.7KB | 1 page ]). The eastern area included 12 coastal provinces (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Liaoning, Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Fujian, Guangxi, and Hainan); the central area was composed of 9 provinces (Heilongjiang, Jilin, Neimenggu, Shanxi, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui, and Jiangxi); the western area also comprised 9 provinces (Shanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Tibet). After the launch of the Development of the Western Region strategy in 1999, Guangxi and Nemenggu, which originally belonged to the eastern and central areas, respectively, were assigned to the western area.

Four-Region Division. After 2005, the PRC's central government has divided the nation into four regions in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan. The current regions are eastern, central, western, and northeastern areas (Figure A-4 [ PDF 307.8KB | 1 page ]).

The four-region division is updated to differentiate the 31 provinces in the PRC. More importantly, it helps the government to develop corresponding macroeconomic policies. For example, the Development of the Western Region strategy focuses on the western regions, while the strategy to revitalize the northeastern region and other old industrial bases aims to promote the development of the northeastern region. The four-region division is reasonable given the current environment, and the intra-regional disparities are much smaller than the inter-regional disparity (see Figure 11 [ PDF 99.2KB | 1 page ]). Therefore, we have analyzed regional disparities based on this four-region system.

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