What if Chinese regions were independent countries?
Of all the statistics we read about China, most of them fall in to one of two groups: statistics about how big China is, and statistics about how fast China is developing. Many of the most impressive statistics cover both of these, for example; between 1981 and 2004 an estimated 500 million Chinese citizens climbed out of poverty. That’s more than the population of Brazil and Indonesia, the world’s fourth and fifth most populous countries, combined.
Officially, China’s population is split between 31 regions, from the dense urban areas around Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin, to the vast plains of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia . The largest of these in terms of population is the southern region of Guangdong, home to almost 110 million people. If Guangdong were a country in its own right, it would be the world’s 14th most populous, between Mexico and The Philippines. In fact, all but three of China’s 31 regions have over 10 million people, placing each of them in the 100 most populated countries. 20 of them would be in the world’s top 50 and 13 are larger than the largest US state, California. Figure 1 compares each region of China to a country with a similar population.
China’s huge population has also helped propel the country into becoming the second largest economy in the world, behind only the USA. Many of the largest and richest Chinese regions have significantly large economies in their own right. The largest economy again belongs to Guangdong, which comes in at $1.2 trillion, a similar size to Spain the world’s 14th largest. Many other regions have economies of a similar size to other large developed economies such as Mexico and Switzerland. Shanghai’s 24 million citizens produce as much GDP as the whole of Thailand. It’s quite incredible to think that places most people outside China have never heard of (Zhejiang, anyone?) would be among the world’s most powerful economies if they were independent countries.
However, China is also very diverse, both culturally and economically. For example, most people probably don’t know that China is home to 23 million Muslims. Or that China is home to both the highest number of billionaires, and the highest number of people living in extreme poverty. Figure 3 compares each of the Chinese regions to countries with a similar GDP per capita. This helps to shows the huge differences in incomes and living standards across China. The richest regions, Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai have similar average incomes to Mexico (roughly $17,000), while the poorest are comparable to countries such as Ghana and Pakistan (around $4–5,000).
There are also stark differences in the life expectancy of the different Chinese regions. People living in the healthiest regions, Shanghai and Beijing can expect to live over 82 years, among the longest in the world. While on the other hand, people in Tibet live for only 65 years. That’s the difference between Spain (3rd in the world) and Yemen (160th).
Data on the Chinese regions was quite hard to come by, and so some of these statistics are slightly out of date. The country-level data was taken from the World Bank, using the same years’ data as the Chinese regions.
