The Territories of the People’s Republic of China

The excellent and well‐known series of Europa regional yearbooks is now being supplemented by a series of smaller volumes devoted to the constituent parts of the larger countries. In terms of population, no country is larger than China (with 1,300 million people) so her provinces and other administrative areas are themselves of major importance: nine out of the 35 have populations larger than the UK. The two introductory essays in this volume demonstrate that although China is a unitary and not a federal state, the economic reforms of the past 25 years have allowed the provinces much more financial autonomy...