City listing/Talk

I removed Hong Kong from the city list because the Hong Kong SAR contains plenty of areas that aren't part of the city itself, and the entry as written is based on the CIA factbook and covers the whole SAR, including the fishing villages on Lamma Island :) Just for the record, none of this is meant to imply that HK isn't Chinese. --Robert Merkel

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How is this for Hong Kong the city? --rmhermen

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I disagree. Hong Kong has been referred to as a city as long as I could remember. The term SAR only distinguishes it as a Special Administration Region which does not affect its status as a city of China. BTW, Hong Kong is not the only SAR in China, see ShenZhen?. The boundary of the city should be defined by the juridiction of the city councils which includes the entire SAR, not just the urban area. It is true that the city is subdivided into many districts. So does New York city. Can you say New York is not a city because of its five boroughs?

Besides, the western concept of city does not apply well in the Chinese government system. In China, there are several "cities" that are directly administrated by the central government, i.e. some cities (including Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai etc.) are at the same level as provinces politically even though geographically within a provinces. It is kinda confusing for people who don't know the system. A direct administrated city is big enough to cover multiple prefectures and villeges, town and smaller cities. One may argue that it is not a city any more, but it is run as a city. So you have to be very clear on how you define a city in this article, by the government structure, or by the urbanization? The fishing villages on Lamma Island are not villages in the same sense that Greenwich Village is not a village within New York, NY.

See http://www.worldsat.ca/con_products/hk_bg.html and notice only a small part of Hong Kong is urbanized. The city is 95% green. The heavy urbanization on the upper left corner of the picture is outside Hong Kong in Shen Zhen.