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35 Chinese Cities With Economies as Big as Countries

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35 Chinese Cities With Economies As Big as Countries

35 Chinese Cities With Economies As Big as Countries

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Gaining perspective on China’s monstrous economy isn’t always the easiest thing to do.

With 1.4 billion people and the third-largest geographical area, the country is a vast place to begin with. Add in explosive economic growth, a market-oriented but Communist government, a longstanding and complex cultural history, and self-inflicted demographic challenges – and understanding China can be even more of a puzzle.

City by City

To truly grasp the emergence of China, one approach is to look at the impressive economic footprint made by the country’s cities.

Of course, cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong are the metro economic powerhouses that most people are familiar with. But have you heard of cities like Shijiazhuang, Wuxi, Changsha, Suzhou, Ningbo, Foshan, or Yantai?

There are literally dozens of Chinese cities that most people in Western countries have never heard of – yet they each hold millions of people and have an economic output comparable to nations.

Here’s a list of 35 of them, the size of their local economy, and a comparably sized national economy:

RankChinese CityCity GDP (2015, PPP, in billions)Comparable Country
#1Shanghai$810Philippines
#2Beijing$664U.A.E.
#3Guangzhou$524Switzerland
#4Shenzhen$491Sweden
#5Tianjin$478Romania
#6Suzhou$440Austria
#7Chongqing$425Chile
#8Hong Kong$414Peru
#9Wuhan$324Israel
#10Chengdu$306Norway
#11Hangzhou$275Greece
#12Nanjing$272Denmark
#13Wuxi$270Morocco
#14Qingdao$266Hungary
#15Changsha$246Sri Lanka
#16Dalian$245Finland
#17Foshan$235Uzbekistan
#18Ningbo$233Angola
#19Shenyang$230Sudan
#20Zhengzhou$210Ecuador
#21Tangshan$191New Zealand
#22Dongguan$186Ethiopia
#23Yantai$184Belarus
#24Jinan$174Azerbaijan
#25Nantong$170Slovakia
#26Changchun$163Dominican Republic
#27Xi'an$161Kenya
#28Fuzhou$160Tanzania
#29Harbin$159Bulgaria
#30Hefei$157Tunisia
#31Shijiazhuang$156Guatemala
#32Xuzhou$150Ghana
#33Changzhou$147Serbia
#34Wenzhou$131Croatia
#35Zibo$123Panama

Megaregions

It’s also important to remember that these cities don’t exist in isolation, and are instead cogs in the wheels of larger megaregions. Such areas would be comparable to the Northeast U.S., in which New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. are all hours apart and remain largely integrated as a regional economy.

In China, there are three main megaregions worth noting:

Yangtze River Delta
With a combined GDP of $2.17 trillion, which is comparable to Italy, the Yangtze River Delta contains cities like Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Wuxi, Ningbo, and Changzhou.

Pearl River Delta
With a combined GDP of $1.89 trillion, which is comparable to South Korea, the Pearl River Delta has cities like Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, Dongguan, and Macao.

Beijing-Tianjin
With a combined GDP of $1.14 trillion, which is comparable to Australia, this megaregion holds the two largest cities in northern China, Beijing and Tianjin. The two cities are a 30-minute bullet train ride apart.

Note: After publication, it was pointed out that GDP figures for the Chinese cities seemed to be adjusted for PPP and that our source (Brookings Institution) incorrectly had labeled them as nominal in the tables of this document. We have since updated the infographic so that everything is based on PPP, and added four new cities as well.

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Markets

Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

We visualize the recent performance of the Magnificent Seven stocks, uncovering a clear divergence between the group’s top and bottom names.

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Will Tesla Lose Its Spot in the Magnificent Seven?

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

In this graphic, we visualize the year-to-date (YTD) performance of the “Magnificent Seven”, a leading group of U.S. tech stocks that gained prominence in 2023 as the replacement of FAANG stocks.

All figures are as of March 12, 2024, and are listed in the table below.

RankCompanyYTD Change (%)
1Nvidia90.8
2Meta44.3
3Amazon16.9
4Microsoft12
5Google0.2
6Apple-6.7
7Tesla-28.5

From these numbers, we can see a clear divergence in performance across the group.

Nvidia and Meta Lead

Nvidia is the main hero of this show, setting new all-time highs seemingly every week. The chipmaker is currently the world’s third most valuable company, with a valuation of around $2.2 trillion. This puts it very close to Apple, which is currently valued at $2.7 trillion.

The second best performer of the Magnificent Seven has been Meta, which recently re-entered the trillion dollar club after falling out of favor in 2022. The company saw a massive one-day gain of $197 billion on Feb 2, 2024.

Apple and Tesla in the Red

Tesla has lost over a quarter of its value YTD as EV hype continues to fizzle out. Other pure play EV stocks like Rivian and Lucid are also down significantly in 2024.

Meanwhile, Apple shares have struggled due to weakening demand for its products in China, as well as the company’s lack of progress in the artificial intelligence (AI) space.

Investors may have also been disappointed to hear that Apple’s electric car project, which started a decade ago, has been scrapped.

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