ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the Chinese data and the functional attributes of the urban system in the People's Republic. A major difficulty confronting any study of urbanisation is the definition of what constitutes urbanness. Given the paucity of urban population data over the 1960s and 1970s, unrelieved in the 1980s by the offerings of the various yearbooks, it was anticipated that the 1982 census would finally clear up past mysteries. The absence of a plausible basis for determining the size of China's urban population has led some Chinese specialists to rely on foreign estimates. A major analysis of China's urbanisation conducted in 1982 beat an unashamed retreat from the slough of official data, and is written entirely around various United Nations figures. An examination of the national urban data available for international comparison might lead one to the conclusion that the assessment of China's urban size is a matter of no more than academic interest.
