Pareto's Law and City Size in China: Diverging Patterns in Land and People

Using Pareto’s Law as a benchmark, the very largest cities in China appear to have scope to absorb more migrants, contrary to the pro-small bias in urban policy. We use population census data from 2000 and 2010 and remote sensing data to study the evolution of the size distribution of Chinese cities in terms of land and people. Migrants without local hukou registration increasingly congregate in a few larger cities, so previous studies that rely on the count of local hukou holders wrongly make the city size distribution seem more even. Temporal comparisons show the city size distribution is diverging in terms of the urban resident population but converging in terms of land area. These divergent patterns suggest that growth in the resident population of large cities is not being assisted by fast enough area expansion, while area expansion of less populous cities is too fast for their slow growth in resident numbers.