Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jychang | Hacker News Reader

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Germany has only 80 million people, however. And the cities in Germany are all spread out around the country.

China has 1.3 billion people, mostly clustered on the east coast. Building megacities is basically mandatory. According to Wikipedia [1], a "medium sized city" with population 1 to 3 million people, in China, would be among 169 other cities. There are 73 cities with a population over 3 million, in 2010. A city with exactly 1 million people would be rank 242 in China... the city (town?) ranked 242 in population in Germany would be the city/town of Eisenach, population 42,700. That's a seriously small city, or about half the population of Mountain View, California.

And these numbers are from the 2010 census- according to some sources, China's population has increased by 80 million people from 2010 to 2016. That's the size of one entire Germany.

The comparison here between cities in Germany vs cities in China isn't exactly fair.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...

[2] http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/german_topcities3.html

You are not accounting for surface area for both countries or population density.

Germany has even higher population density than China (245 vs 137). Of course we have to account for the gobi desert but even so population shouldn't be a factor of comparison.

I agree that the comparison is not fair though, mainly because the infrastructure development between both countries is vastly different, a better infrastructure helps in distributing population over large areas in my opinion.

Since state area alone doesn't produce anything (maybe it's a rough indicator for general access to share of natural resources, but that's not relevant here)

The comparison could be done on province level though.

If you add up Jiangxi and Fujian Province you would end up with roughly the same are and population as Germany with a slightly higher density.

A significant part of China is a desert. Historically the population of China has been clustered along its east coast. That area is not that much bigger than Germany (if at all).

Look at this section of the wiki article for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati...

From the exact link you provide, if you remove the desert regions (Tibet, Inner Mongolia..etc..), you end up with 4,403,605 km2 (45.55%) for a population 1,221,000,000 (93.89%) and a density of 277h/km2. It is still 10 times the size of Germany.

The population density for that region (277/km2) is higher than that of Germany (235/km2).

My point was to demonstrate that you sentence "That area is not that much bigger than Germany (if at all)" is completely wrong.

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