Administrative Regions of China

Article by China Economic Review - CHINA BUSINESS GUIDE 2007

China - the People's Republic of China
China's official name is the People's Republic of China (PRC). Central leadership is concentrated in the capital, Beijing, beneath which the country is divided into Thirty Four (34) administrative areas, provinces, regions and municipalities.

Provinces
There are twenty two (22) provinces in the People's Republic of China (PRC) (and not including Taiwan which has been under separate rule since the Communist victory in 1949), as follows:
Anhui, Fujian, Gansu, Guangdong,Guizhou, Hainan, Hebei, Heilongjiang, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Jilin, Liaoning, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Shandong, Shanxi, Sichuan, Yunnan and Zhejiang.

Regions
There are five (5) " autonomous regions", each named after the minority group that dominates the particular region. They are: Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region and Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. These regions are governed in effectively the same way as the provinces.

Municipalities
There are four cities designated as centrally administered municipalities as follows: Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Tianjin. Rumors occasionally surface that other bustling metropolises such as Nanjing, Dalian, Shenzhen and Wuhan could be promoted to municipality status. Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin have operated as separate municipalities since the 1950s while Chongqing became a municipality in 1997, partly to provide more focussed administrative support to the Three Gorges dam project and the huge population and economic changes taking place upstream from the dam along the Yangtze River valley, and also to promote faster growth in the poor and largely neglected western provinces.

Special Administrative Regions
China originally created the concept of the special administrative regions (SARs) to allow for the integration of the former foreign-run colonies of Hong Kong and Macau back into China's administrative structure. The special administrative regions (SARs) of Hong Kong and Macau are allowed a high degree of administrative independence, although there is a lively debate in Hong Kong over the extent to which the 1997 handover agreement, allowing for " One Country; Two Systems" and fifty years of autonomy, has or has not been observed since. The fact that there is such a debate at all clearly differentiates Hong Kong from the mainland. A long-term goal of the SAR concept is to encourage Taiwan to return to the embrace of the mainland. This issue remains one of the most sensitive on the Chinese political scene.