The World’s Largest Modern City is in China
From Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Guangzhou, over 85 million people live in the megalopolis of Guangdong Province, manufacturing everything from electric vehicles to semiconductors on a global scale.
The electronics manufacturing industry produces the hardware upon which modern civilization relies for crucial functions such as defense, finance, healthcare, and administration, and which has formed a key plank of the growing global consumer economy in recent decades. The central node of the global electronics manufacturing industry is neither California, Europe, Japan, nor South Korea, but the Pearl River Delta region of southern China’s Guangdong Province—particularly the coastal city of Shenzhen, which has a population of nearly 13 million people, over two million of whom worked in manufacturing in 2019.1 The region as a whole, alternatively called the “Greater Bay Area” and which also includes Hong Kong, Macau, and the provincial capital of Guangzhou, overtook Tokyo as “the largest urban area in the world in both size and population” in 2015, and in 2020 it counted 85 million inhabitants.2