Comment by mschild
> our small city > 3.7 million
China's and India's population numbers always boggle my mind.
Made several friends during my master that were from China. One of them was from Shenyang. Never heard the name before and I'm usually pretty decent with geography. Around 8m inhabitants. Not even in the top 10 population wise. There isnt a single city in the 100 largest cities in China that is below 1m.
It's a common source of confusion. The administrative definition of a 'city' is the equivalent of its metropolitan area + all satelite 'towns' and their suburbs (including farm lands).
My hometown has a population of 3.4 million (prefecture level city or 3rd tier as people call it). But it has an area about 6000 km^2, easily reaching the total size of London. At its core the central town has roughly a population of 700,000. And there are 4 more towns after the central one, each has smaller villages and suburbs under them. People living in these towns wouldn't consider they are living in the same city.