How Many Provinces Are There in China?
All together there are 34 province-level administrative units in China, including 4 municipalities, 22 Provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 2 special districts, and Taiwan, which Beijing considers a province but is not actually under the administration of the People’s Republic of China.
The 4 municipalities are Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing. These cities are known as “zhixiashi” in Chinese, meaning “directly administered city.” This refers to the fact that in China’s administrative system these cities are on the same level as the provinces and answers directly to the central government. Of these 4 cities, Beijing and Shanghai and Tianjin obtained the zhixiashi status shortly after 1949, due to the fact that at the time these were the largest and most important cities in China. Chongqing was awarded this status in the 1990s to facilitate the construction of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Chongqing used to be a part of Sichuan Province.
The 22 provinces of China are: Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Hebei, Shaanxi, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Fujian, Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong, Hainan, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, Shanxi, Gansu, Qinghai. Please note that there is Shaanxi Province and Shanxi Province. Actually there should not have been this difference; while the two names do look different in Chinese characters, when Romanized both of them should have appeared as “Shanxi”; to avoid confusion one of them is arbitrarily changed to “Shaanxi.” Shaanxi is the province in which the First Qin Emperor’s Terra-cotta Warriors are located.
The 5 autonomous regions of China are: Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region, Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region, Tibetan Autonomous Region, and Guangxi Zhuang Nationality Autnomous Region. As the names indicate, these regions are classified as autonomous regions rather than provinces because these are the areas in which China’s largest ethnic minority people reside.
Hong Kong and Macao are the two special administrative districts of China. After being conceded or leased to Great Britain and Portugal in the 19th century, they were governed by the two said countries till the end of the 1990s when they were returned to China. Today, as special administrative districts they enjoy autonomy on a level much higher than those enjoyed by the “autonomous regions”; the cities essentially manage all of their own affairs except foreign relations and defense.
Taiwan was a province of China in the 19th century. It was conceded to Japan after a defeat of China at the hand of Japan in 1895. It rejoined China after World War II buta civil war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists resulted in the de facto separation of the island from continental China. The Nationalists, upon their defeat on the continent, retreated there, and their state, the Republic of China, has survived to the present time. The People’s Republic of China, the state founded by the Chinese Communists, has insisted on sovereignty over Taiwan, a position backed by the United Nations recognized by most countries in the world.
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