From the Statistics Department

For all of you amazed by numbers:

Beijing, China's second most populous city, [first is Shanghai] has a population twice that of Los Angeles (7.74 million compared with 3.87 million).
A mere 1.4% of all Chinese live in either Shanghai or Beijing., and just 3.8% of the country's population resides in any of China's 10 most populous cities.
So where do nearly 90% of urban China's residents actually live? In the "Third China" -- a rapidly expanding set of second-tier cities beyond the country's 10 largest, which most non-Chinese, and even some Chinese themselves, have never heard of. Even though it is still predominantly rural, China has 45 cities with populations of 1 million or more within the city proper, each with a population greater than that of the City of Detroit. The United States has only nine such cities.