China Travel Guide

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Introduction to Provinces in China (PRC)

When travelling in China, sometimes a visitor can tell which province of the country a person is from whenever one knows something about the person's ethnicity. That is because many of the Chinese citizens are from provinces or autonomous regions which are of largely particular ethnic origins. In fact, some of the areas of China which seem to be very much like provinces are not actually called provinces by the national government or by the local governments.

China is divided into various governmental units below the central government of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In descending order, the governmental units are province, followed by prefecture, followed by county, then township and finally village. This introductory page deals with provinces and the various provincial-level regions that do not go by the title of province.

China has thirty-three province-level regional titles although only twenty-two are actually called provinces. Of the eleven remaining regional titles, five are considered to be autonomous regions, four are called municipalities and two are special administrative regions that have more recently been added to the People's Republic of China.

The five autonomous regions are ones which appoint minority ethnic governors from that particular region. However, those appointed governors are not final authority figures within that autonomous region. The real power person within each autonomous region is the Party Secretary who keeps the region under the final authority of the PRC. Those Party Secretary positions are always held by Han Chinese, not the local minorities. The five autonomous regions of China are Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The four municipalities are large cities which carry the same status as a province although their area sizes are much smaller than that of provinces. In those cities, the city mayors are also delegates to the National People's Congress. Just as is the case with the autonomous regions, the mayors are not the final authority figures. As with the autonomous regions, the Party Secretary of each city helps to keep the city under the control of the PRC. The four cities which carry the same status as provinces, although they are not parts of any province, are Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chonqing.

Two cities make up the two special administrative regions in China. They are cities which had recently been colonies of European nations. Hong Kong and Macau have become self-governing parts of the People's Republic of China. Although largely self-governing, they are definitely under the PRC control. Each of them has a governor as the chief executive. In the realms of foreign policy and military defence, they must rely on the central government completely.

Besides some degree of reorganization of some provinces in China's northeast and the addition of Hong Kong and Macau as special administrative regions, the provinces have kept the same boundaries since the seventeenth century.