Understanding Chinese City Tiers 2/2: Who's The Best? What's "Average?"
Actually we can learn a lot from Yicai's annual rankings of Chinese city tiers...
This is essay Part 2/2 exploring China’s City Tier ranking system. Before you read this, you should read Part 1/2 here, and make sure we’re all on the same page.
The 2025 Tier List
In late May, Yicai released its newest ranking of China’s top cities for 2025, as the “2025 Ranking of Cities’ Attractiveness in China 2025”.
The list of the top 19 cities is below, along with the sub-category weighting criteria. This is split into two tiers: the 1st and the “New 1st Tiers”. Here’s the list. What do you think?
Remember, Yicai’s whole schtick is identifying the“New 1st Tiers”, or the up-and-coming cities that are maturing to the point where they may offer competitive opportunities and lifestyles to the original T1 cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen). So their real focus is on identifying #5-19, while their methodology allows them to also categorize every other city too.
For simplicity in this piece, I’m going to refer to the Big 4 as the “S Tier” cities, and the “New 1st Tier” as just “1st Tier” or “T1”. This isn’t really standard, but it makes things easier for me…
If you’ve been following these lists for a few years, you’ll see mostly familiar city names here. Here are some comments on the cities at the top:
In the S-Tier, Shanghai barely held the #1 city rank, a position it has now had for 5 years in a row after passing Beijing in 2020. But the difference is very minimal. Do I think it should actually be this close? No, no I do not. For pretty much everything except government relations, diplomacy, and NGO work, I think Shanghai is the superior city for commercial competitiveness, by far, not 63/100 of one point!
Shenzhen is now opening up a small points lead against Guangzhou, a city it previously has often swapped ranks with. Long-term, I think Shenzhen is better-equipped to hold onto the #3 position, but we’ll see. Notice that the original phrasing of the Big 4 was “北上广深” or Beijing - Shanghai - Guangzhou - Shenzhen. It seems we’d need to revise the phrasing to 北上深广, if Shenzhen holds onto the #3 slot.
The leading T1 (i.e. #5) this year is once again Chengdu, which has held this position in Yicai’s rankings for the last 9 years. Chengdu is uncontested for this position, comfortably ahead of #6 Hangzhou, but also not really yet in position to contest the S-Tier. The points gap between Chengdu and #4 Guangzhou is still 2x the gap between Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
After Chengdu come a bunch of paired cities that are roughly similar in development level and competitiveness, and which often swap ranks back and forth: Hangzhou and Chongqing for #7/8, Wuhan and Suzhou for #9/10, and Xi’an/Nanjing for #11/12. Having spent a fair among of time in all these cities for work trips/tourism except Chongqing, I have no issues with these being the top cities…them being here feels pretty intuitive to me. They are all major regional hubs with huge populations, economic power, and continuing growth potential.
The bottom half of the 1st Tier list starting from Changsha and Zhengzhou shouldn’t be categorized as T1, in my opinion. Doing this makes the 1st Tier bucket too broad to be meaningful, because while places like Qingdao and Ningbo are lovely, modern, impressive cities, there’s a noticeable gap between them and the likes of Chengdu or Hangzhou! This is also borne out by the points gap in the index ranking: the bottom S Tier city is just 42 points behind the top S-Tier tier.
Going down 40 points from Chengdu puts you right at the level of Changsha and Zhengzhou…so the points index basically matches my highly subjective vibes-based analysis. Perhaps they should be called Tier 1.5?
That being said, Hefei is clearly a city to watch. The capital of Anhui Province moved up to #15 this year, after barely squeaking onto the the list at #19 last year. Hefei has become a major hub for EV supply chain manfacturing in recent years, and has consistently been on the rise since the “New Economy Competitiveness Index” was added in 2024.
Wuxi is notable by its abrupt absence. The wealthy Jiangsu city which last year popped up into the 1st Tier in the #16 slot dropped five ranks this year to #21, relegating it back to T2 status.
What Is the Most Average City in China?
Attempting to identity and characterize the most “average” or median city in China has been an ongoing effort for me, as I have previously developed lecture materials around the importance of understanding what, if anything, comprises the “median” Chinese urban experience. The Yicai city tier rankings can help us understand this.
There are 337 cities in the index, and the size of the buckets for each Tier are fixed (if you forgot this, go back and review Part 1) so the median city is always a 4th Tier city, and specifically the one that ranks #169.
Last year, our T4 Champion of Averageness was Jiaozuo (焦作), in Henan. For this reason, Jiaozuo has featured often in my lecture materials when I talk about the "median Chinese experience".
This year, we have a new T4 Champion of Averageness, as the #169 spot is occupied by the city of Linfen (临汾) in Shanxi Province. Linfen is about 150km south of the capital Taiyuan and has an administrative population of about 4 million people. In the past, it was infamous for having some of the worst air pollution in the entire country, although it’s greatly improved these days. That’s about all I know about Linfen. I have never visited it…
What is the Most Average Province in China?
Since we know the most average city in China as well as the ranking of every prefecture-level city, I realized we can use this information to estimate the most average province in China (i.e. the province whose cities are as close to the median as possible, on average). To do this, I calculated the average gap between the ranking of all the cities in a given province and the median value, which is 169 (in statistics, this is the Mean Absolute Deviation, or MAD). Here were the results:
It turns out that this year Shanxi doesn’t just have the most median city, but it is itself the most median province, with a MAD of just 48 (the average of its cities’ ranks is just 48 away from #169). Basically, in 2025 you can’t get more averagely Chinese than Shanxi! It also happens to be a province I’ve barely explored.
The least median provinces are places that are either too developed/rich (Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu) or too underdeveloped/poor (Tibet, Qinghai, Ningxia) to be treated as a representative median. I have mentioned previously in my writing elsewhere how rich the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang are compared to the rest of the country - their MAD scores really serve to validate this quantitatively! They honestly only have wealthy cities…even their so-called poor cities like Lianyungang in Jiangsu or Lishui in Zhejiang (which I visited last year) are much wealthier than the national average.
The most median provinces I calculated in this ranking are actually mostly places I would have expected...central Chinese heartland provinces with one strong provincial capital and many smaller cities that aren't really rich, but aren't super under-developed either (and at least have good transportation and are regional business/talent hubs).
Without even looking at the rankings, that's how I would have characterized Shanxi, Anhui, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, or Jiangxi, so I'm not surprised to see them up there. Shanxi seems to be an archetypal example. Besides Taiyuan, none of its cities are really very large…but its bottom cities aren’t THAT poor either, and it has 4 cities clustered right around the median (including Linfen itself, of course):
However, I'm quite surprised by Guizhou being #3 most median. Based on my stereotyped idea of Guizhou as a poorer province, I would have guessed Guizhou would have a much lower MAD, scoring similar to its neighbors Yunnan or Guangxi. But its average city score is quite close to the median too (although on the lower side of it). I really doubt this was the case 10 years ago. This has to be the result of the massive amounts of poverty alleviation programming that has flowed into Guizhou in recent years, propping up those lower-ranked cities.
Also, the provincial capital Guiyang now ranks as high as #37, which is really remarkable to me. The last time I was in Guiyang was 2016, and let’s just say it looked…rough.
So…What is the Strongest Province?
We can calculate this by seeing who has the lowest average point score (i.e. highest ranking) across all their cities. For this ranking, I excluded Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Chongqing, as nationally-controlled municipalities, as they only have one city’s data point (themselves).
If you just read my comments above about how wealthy Jiangsu and Zhejiang are, these results won’t be too surprising:
Zhejiang is strong, but Jiangsu is even stronger. Jiangsu doesn’t even have any cities out of the top 100, while Zhejiang has three (Zhoushan, Lishui, and Quzhou). Jiangsu doesn’t even have a single T4 city, while Zhejiang has two (Lishui and Zhoushan). Its lowest-ranked cities (all in Northern Jiangsu) are still in the top quartile nationwide. Jiangsu is so strong.
The first three provinces in this ranking are probably all not very surprising: Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shandong are all wealthy, industrialized, coastal provinces known for having well-developed cities, good transportation, and strong economies. But Hebei being in #4 was probably a bit of a surprise. Hebei isn’t poor, per se, but it’s not really known for being strongly rich either, and I doubt anyone would have guessed that it would rank higher than Guangdong.
The key here is that while Hebei doesn’t have that many very strong cities, it also has relatively few obviously weak cities. 7 of its cities are in the top 100, and the other 4 are all in the top 200, with only one actually meaningfully below the median (Chengde, just north of Beijing, which ranks #193). This helps keep its average high.
On the other hand, Guangdong has much greater diversity among its cities:
Of course Guangdong has very strong cities at the top of the rankings and a bunch of pretty-strong cities in the T2 and T3 levels, but also some obvious stragglers, with 8 cities in the 100-200 range and even one lowly T5 to drag down the average (Yunfu, in the mountains of western Guangdong, ranking #238).
Unsurprisingly, the bottom-ranking provinces nationwide are all the poorest and least-developed regions in the northeast, northwest, and southwest like Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Heilongjiang. They suffer from poor natural resources, extreme terrain making transportation difficult, and weak industrial competitiveness, being far from the coasts and consumption demand centers.
Who is On the Rise?
So...which provinces are making big gains? For this, I calculated which provinces saw their cities have the biggest average rises in their ranking YoY:
Big gains in Gansu! Although still weak overall, Gansu saw the biggest rise from 2024 to 2025. Nearly every city in Gansu improved its ranking except two (Lanzhou and Wuwei) with the most obvious gains in some low-ranked T5s like Longnan, Qingyang, and Gannan (I visited Gannan last year! Essays coming soon. Stay tuned.)
Tianshui even improved its score enough to jump from a T5 to a T4 ranking, becoming Gansu’s first city other than Lanzhou to be ranked something other than Fifth Tier! Does that make Tianshui the second-most commercially attractive city in Gansu after Lanzhou? According to Yicai’s methodology, yes.
Henan and Shanxi also did well this year, rising an average of 12 and 13 ranks respectively. Our new median city Linfen (Shanxi) rose 23 ranks. The old median Jiaozuo (Henan) rose 14 ranks.
Meanwhile, the "losingest" province was Inner Mongolia, where cities lost an average of 16 ranking spots vs. last year. Tibetan cities also did poorly. I'm wondering if some specific tweak to the methodology this year particularly disadvantaged these regions? Or if they actually lost competitiveness YoY? My instinct is the first one. Actually, my instinct for the rankings of these T4s and T5s is that methodology tweaks account for most of the changes in score, rather than any actual intrinsic changes in the cities themselves.
By the way, the "losingest" individual city, dropping a stunning 53 ranks, was my own Ezhou, Hubei (my wife is from Ezhou and I usually visit once a year for Chinese New Year). My older essay about New Countryside and Rural Rejuvenation programming features the countryside of Ezhou.
After slipping so many ranks, Ezhou has been firmly relegated to Tier 5. I am now officially a T5 son-in-law. Whatever methdology tweaks happened for 2025 were just brutal for Ezhou.
But on the flipside, this methdology adjustment was good for many cities.
Ili Prefecture in Xinjiang leapt an an astounding 65 ranks in one year (but it's still a T5, so that shows you how lowly it was ranked before). Kashgar also in Xinjiang rose 50 ranks and crossed the ranking threshold to become a T4 city (barely). Just like Tianshui in Gansu, Kashgar is the first city in Xinjiang besides the capital to rank something higher than T5. Hooray for Kashgar.
But! These kinds of huge swings illustrate the limitations of such a ranking, in my opinion. Did any of these cities actually change enough in one year to justify gaining or losing 50 ranks? Probably not... This is mostly methodology-driven.
But trends are still interesting, of course. And now I have a bunch of new reference points and data to aid in my ongoing on-the-ground exploration of Chinese demographics and the rural-urban structure of cities, counties, and towns.
Okay, I think that’s enough for now. I know I probably lost a bunch of people along the way when I got too deep into the numbers, but if you’re the kind of nerd who enjoys this kind of stuff (like I am), then thanks for sticking with me ‘til the end! See you next time!
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy:
China’s complex administrative structure
The true urbanization rate of China
Why highway-building is actually poverty alleviation
I thoroughly appreciated these two pieces! So informative and useful - thank you 🙏🏻
Hebei Rising!