It would not be an exaggeration to say that the People's Republic
of China has one of the world's most complex systems of defining
urban population. As evidenced by the massive literature generated,
China watchers in the West have expended an enormous amount of
energy in trying to understand the Chinese system. About a decade
ago, in one of the apparently futile quests, the size of the Chinese urban
population was declared an insoluble "enigma" (Orleans and Burnham,
1984). Today we are, of course, better off: the baffling mysteries
surrounding China's urban population size between 1949 and 1982
have since been cleared up through the assiduous work of many
scholars (Chan and Xu, 1985; Ma and Cui, 1987). In rapidly changing
China, however, recent developments in the definition of what is
"urban" and urban boundaries since 1983 have, among other things,
created many new problems for urbanists in their attempt to understand
urbanization and migration in mainland China in the 1980s.