The Prefecture-level city reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Prefecture-level city

A prefecture-level city (地级市 Pinyin: dìjí shì, literally "region-level city") is an administrative division of China that is governed directly by provincess of the People's Republic of China. These entities are not "cities" in the strictest sense of the word, since they usually contain rural areas many times the size of their urban, built-up area. Nevertheless these divisions have become the norm for prefecture-level divisions in China. It is possible that we are witnessing a semantic shift of the Chinese term for "city" -- 市 shì -- from "city" to "administrative area"; 市区 shìqū, or "urban area", is probably the closest Chinese term now to English "city".

A prefecture-level city ranks lower than municipality, and ranks higher than county-class cities. The first ones were created on November 5, 1983. And most the rest 265 existing ones were made such in the remainder of the 1980s.

Criteria that a prefecture must meet to become a prefecture-level city:

• An urban centre with a non-farmer population over 250,000
• gross output of value of industry of 200,000,000 RMB
• the output of tertiary industry supersedes that of primary industry
• Over 35% of the GDP

Most provinces are completely subdivided into prefecture-class cities, but some provinces -- Hunan, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, Qinghai -- also have other prefecture-level entities (prefectures and autonomous prefectures).

Baoding (Hebei Province), Zhoukou (Henan), Nanyang (Henan), and Linyi (Shandong) are the largest prefecture-class cities, superseding the population of Tianjin.

A sub-prefecture-level city (副地級市), or vice-prefecture-level city, is in a transition state from a county-level city to a true prefecture-level city. They are not numerous; current ones include Chaozhou (Guangdong, since 1990) and Tianshui (Gansu, since 1984).

Sub-provincial cities are sometimes placed on the same tier as prefecture-level cities, or counted as such.

See also: Provincial city,Political divisions of China

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