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> "[in 2000] Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi" A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indi

> "[in 2000] Shi agreed and ended up settling in the small city of Wuxi" A bit of a tangent, but it’s always strange to me when people describe Chinese or Indian cities with millions of residents as "small". Wuxi had >1 million people in 2000, and today has like 3.5 million (6.5 million in the prefecture). This article makes it sound like a minor town in a remote province, but Jiangsu has about the same population as Germany, twice as populous as California, and is an industrial powerhouse ~with~ [edit: adjacent to] the busiest port in the world (Shanghai). Nobody ever writes about "the small city of Dallas" or "the small city of San Diego" or "the small city of Birmingham" or "the small city of Munich".

krapht 6y ago
Small and big are relative descriptions, not absolute. Jiangsu province is small compared to the major Chinese metropolitan areas. Comparing cities to world regions is rarely done. Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.
- laurencerowe 6y ago
  > Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London. If Birmingham – the 20th biggest urban agglomeration in Europe – is small, what should the many hundreds of smaller cities be termed? (London is a megacity.)
BurningFrog 6y ago
That's probably how the Chinese refer to it? You can also interpret it as meaning "insignificant". A poor city with the same population as London has a much lower profile.
- ximeng 6y ago
  https://www.zhihu.com/question/22769200 https://www.zhihu.com/question/22769200 first answer to "what is Wuxi like?" starts with "Is Wuxi really a small city?". And the answer is... it was but isn't really now. So it sounds like this is a common preconception in Chinese too as you say.
- kragen 6y ago
  I don't think Wuxi is insignificant. Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time. Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi. Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small. But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's. If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore. Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today. — ⁂ — Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here. Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.
zamadatix 6y ago
There's also the confounding matter of physical size - a prefecture level "city" like Wuxi is going to be nearly 20x the physical area of Birmingham (10x the size including the surrounding area) so holding a million people at the time doesn't mean it's necessarily a big population center even before comparing to what's "normal" in the country.
- kragen 6y ago
  Wuxi, at 5.03 million people (6.6 million in the prefecture it governs) has about three times the population of Birmingham, England (1.1 million inhabitants, 3.7 million in the metropolitan era). The Wuxi prefecture covers 4600 km², the Birmingham area 600 km², a ratio of about 8:1; the cities proper are 1640 km² (the five districts of Wuxi with the 5 million population, excluding Jiangyin and Yixin) and 268 km² (Birmingham), a ratio of about 6:1. Your 20:1 is kind of in the ballpark. However, Wuxi's central Liangxi Qu (72 km²) had a density of 13000/km² in 02010, when Wuxi had a population of only 3.5 million. This was 944k people, 83% of the population of Birmingham proper in 02019. If that had increased proportionally, which seems unlikely, it would be almost 19000/km² today. Birmingham proper averages 4300/km². I conclude that there is no plausible sense in which Wuxi is less "necessarily a big population center" than Birmingham. See my longer comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408
  - MrPatan 6y ago
    > 02010 > 02019 I have no idea what your point is, because I got stuck every time at "why write years like that?". It even looks like a postcode, in a sentence about city populations and areas.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Rerarom 6y ago
      https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...
quink 6y ago
Just a tiny bit of clarification, Shanghai isn’t part of Jiangsu, but just to the southeast of it. It does act as a major port for much of Jiangsu though, together with Suzhou in Jiangsu, right next to Shanghai.
jmu1234567890 6y ago
Wuxi has yummy pai gu (pork spare ribs in sauce)
Haga 6y ago
It's small by Chinese standards.
knolax 6y ago
I thought Birmingham was a small city.
- Tempest1981 6y ago
  Birmingham, Alabama is.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I used to have a Chinese colleague who when asked where he came from would answer that he was from "A small town, you wouldn't know it. Only 3M people". He was right; I had never heard of it. I guess in China, which has multiple mega cities, that is indeed a bit unremarkable. It's all relative.
- tralarpa 6y ago
  I am laughing because something very similar happened to me. I visited a friend in one of those "smaller" cities in China (3M; not even in the top 30). He told me that his parents had moved to a nearby "village" after retirement. The village: >200k.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  China has over 100 cities with a population north of 1 million.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fho 6y ago
  Something similar kind of happened to me ... the university I am at (normally) comprises 50k people. No idea where they are ... especially because Bielefeld University is just one building.
- svachalek 6y ago
  My wife is from a city of 7 million in China. Not only would you not have heard of it, most Chinese I've met also need some explanation of where it is. I've traveled in China, and sometimes we just stop at some convenient roadside "village" for lunch, the kind of place that would have a Denny's and a gas station in the US. Except in China, the restaurant has five stories and it's bumper to bumper traffic outside. The population difference is really hard to get used to.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Pretty much all European cities are small bar Paris and London so no need to qualify them. Same in the US. NYC and Chicago are the only big cities by Asian standards (LA isn’t really a city IMO but population wise would also qualify).
- adventured 6y ago
  Moscow is larger than Paris or London. Madrid is 5-6 million. Saint Petersburg, Barcelona and Berlin are over five million. None of those are small by Asian standards. (to claim Paris is a large city by Asian standards, you must be going by the metropolitan area population) The Los Angeles metro area is also one of the largest in the world. It is very obviously a city by the same standards that define sprawling Asian cities, and it's larger than Chicago.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Russia is Russia. I don’t count it as European though people do. I live in Berlin and it is small (also it’s only 3.6m people metro area). LA is all metro area with no city which is why I don’t think of it as a city. It doesn’t have the density. Measuring Paris’ population by city proper makes no sense at all. Having spent considerable time in all 3 continents and many of the cities mentioned I think there is a significant difference once cities hit 8m+ population. They become much more imposing and seem to suffer from a different class of infrastructure problems than small cities.
    - maks25 6y ago
      Doesn’t really matter whether you do or not, it’s in Europe.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        Ok 3 cities. Russia is in Europe like Turkey is. So make that 4 cities.
rurban 6y ago
You need to see the context. Wuxi is between Shuzhou (10m) and Nanjing (8.8m), next to Shanghai (26m) and Hangzhou (21m). All much much bigger than Wuxi. Wuxi was once pretty important, but it lost its importance when the tin production ran out. It literally means "No tin anymore". People see it is neat small garden city. Wuxi itself is very small, but has two bigger satellite cities outside, Yixing (>1mil) and Jiangyin (>1mil). Compared to Shuzhou and its other neighbors it's tiny. Small city is ok.

krapht 6y ago

Small and big are relative descriptions, not absolute. Jiangsu province is small compared to the major Chinese metropolitan areas. Comparing cities to world regions is rarely done. Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London.

laurencerowe 6y ago
> Also I think many people would say Birmingham, England is small. Why? It isn't London. If Birmingham – the 20th biggest urban agglomeration in Europe – is small, what should the many hundreds of smaller cities be termed? (London is a megacity.)

BurningFrog 6y ago

That's probably how the Chinese refer to it? You can also interpret it as meaning "insignificant". A poor city with the same population as London has a much lower profile.

ximeng 6y ago
https://www.zhihu.com/question/22769200 https://www.zhihu.com/question/22769200 first answer to "what is Wuxi like?" starts with "Is Wuxi really a small city?". And the answer is... it was but isn't really now. So it sounds like this is a common preconception in Chinese too as you say.
kragen 6y ago
I don't think Wuxi is insignificant. Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time. Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi. Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small. But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's. If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029 https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore. Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today. — ⁂ — Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here. Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.

zamadatix 6y ago

There's also the confounding matter of physical size - a prefecture level "city" like Wuxi is going to be nearly 20x the physical area of Birmingham (10x the size including the surrounding area) so holding a million people at the time doesn't mean it's necessarily a big population center even before comparing to what's "normal" in the country.

kragen 6y ago
Wuxi, at 5.03 million people (6.6 million in the prefecture it governs) has about three times the population of Birmingham, England (1.1 million inhabitants, 3.7 million in the metropolitan era). The Wuxi prefecture covers 4600 km², the Birmingham area 600 km², a ratio of about 8:1; the cities proper are 1640 km² (the five districts of Wuxi with the 5 million population, excluding Jiangyin and Yixin) and 268 km² (Birmingham), a ratio of about 6:1. Your 20:1 is kind of in the ballpark. However, Wuxi's central Liangxi Qu (72 km²) had a density of 13000/km² in 02010, when Wuxi had a population of only 3.5 million. This was 944k people, 83% of the population of Birmingham proper in 02019. If that had increased proportionally, which seems unlikely, it would be almost 19000/km² today. Birmingham proper averages 4300/km². I conclude that there is no plausible sense in which Wuxi is less "necessarily a big population center" than Birmingham. See my longer comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26930408
- MrPatan 6y ago
  > 02010 > 02019 I have no idea what your point is, because I got stuck every time at "why write years like that?". It even looks like a postcode, in a sentence about city populations and areas.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Rerarom 6y ago
    https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

quink 6y ago

Just a tiny bit of clarification, Shanghai isn’t part of Jiangsu, but just to the southeast of it. It does act as a major port for much of Jiangsu though, together with Suzhou in Jiangsu, right next to Shanghai.

jmu1234567890 6y ago

Wuxi has yummy pai gu (pork spare ribs in sauce)

Haga 6y ago

It's small by Chinese standards.

knolax 6y ago

I thought Birmingham was a small city.

Tempest1981 6y ago
Birmingham, Alabama is.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I used to have a Chinese colleague who when asked where he came from would answer that he was from "A small town, you wouldn't know it. Only 3M people". He was right; I had never heard of it. I guess in China, which has multiple mega cities, that is indeed a bit unremarkable. It's all relative.

tralarpa 6y ago
I am laughing because something very similar happened to me. I visited a friend in one of those "smaller" cities in China (3M; not even in the top 30). He told me that his parents had moved to a nearby "village" after retirement. The village: >200k.
rorykoehler 6y ago
China has over 100 cities with a population north of 1 million.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fho 6y ago
Something similar kind of happened to me ... the university I am at (normally) comprises 50k people. No idea where they are ... especially because Bielefeld University is just one building.
svachalek 6y ago
My wife is from a city of 7 million in China. Not only would you not have heard of it, most Chinese I've met also need some explanation of where it is. I've traveled in China, and sometimes we just stop at some convenient roadside "village" for lunch, the kind of place that would have a Denny's and a gas station in the US. Except in China, the restaurant has five stories and it's bumper to bumper traffic outside. The population difference is really hard to get used to.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Pretty much all European cities are small bar Paris and London so no need to qualify them. Same in the US. NYC and Chicago are the only big cities by Asian standards (LA isn’t really a city IMO but population wise would also qualify).

adventured 6y ago
Moscow is larger than Paris or London. Madrid is 5-6 million. Saint Petersburg, Barcelona and Berlin are over five million. None of those are small by Asian standards. (to claim Paris is a large city by Asian standards, you must be going by the metropolitan area population) The Los Angeles metro area is also one of the largest in the world. It is very obviously a city by the same standards that define sprawling Asian cities, and it's larger than Chicago.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Russia is Russia. I don’t count it as European though people do. I live in Berlin and it is small (also it’s only 3.6m people metro area). LA is all metro area with no city which is why I don’t think of it as a city. It doesn’t have the density. Measuring Paris’ population by city proper makes no sense at all. Having spent considerable time in all 3 continents and many of the cities mentioned I think there is a significant difference once cities hit 8m+ population. They become much more imposing and seem to suffer from a different class of infrastructure problems than small cities.
  - maks25 6y ago
    Doesn’t really matter whether you do or not, it’s in Europe.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      Ok 3 cities. Russia is in Europe like Turkey is. So make that 4 cities.

rurban 6y ago

You need to see the context. Wuxi is between Shuzhou (10m) and Nanjing (8.8m), next to Shanghai (26m) and Hangzhou (21m). All much much bigger than Wuxi. Wuxi was once pretty important, but it lost its importance when the tin production ran out. It literally means "No tin anymore". People see it is neat small garden city. Wuxi itself is very small, but has two bigger satellite cities outside, Yixing (>1mil) and Jiangyin (>1mil). Compared to Shuzhou and its other neighbors it's tiny. Small city is ok.