China Market Guide · 2025
China city rankings
Single-metric leaderboards are easy to game and easy to misread: GDP rewards the biggest municipality, income rewards financial centres, Douyin penetration rewards small tourist towns. This page shows each metric on its own, then the composite that combines them for the 51 scored cities in the guide.
Jump to the index, GDP, income, platform reach, or growth.
YIVA China City Entry Index
Digital access 30% · Consumer depth 30% · Market scale 25% · Policy access 15% — relative score, 0–100.
| # | City | YCEI | Digital | Consumer | Scale | Policy | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shanghai上海 | 86.0 | 77.1 | 84.3 | 99.2 | 85.0 | Priority market |
| 2 | Beijing北京 | 85.1 | 72.2 | 87.9 | 97.2 | 85.0 | Priority market |
| 3 | Guangzhou广州 | 82.6 | 81.9 | 74.2 | 92.0 | 85.0 | Priority market |
| 4 | Shenzhen深圳 | 81.7 | 90.7 | 88.8 | 93.6 | 30.0 | Priority market |
| 5 | Hangzhou杭州 | 74.6 | 76.8 | 77.2 | 83.6 | 50.0 | Priority market |
| 6 | Suzhou苏州 | 71.7 | 59.9 | 91.6 | 86.8 | 30.0 | Established market |
| 7 | Wuhan武汉 | 71.2 | 72.2 | 68.8 | 85.6 | 50.0 | Established market |
| 8 | Chengdu成都 | 69.6 | 76.9 | 54.9 | 90.4 | 50.0 | Established market |
| 9 | Chongqing重庆 | 68.7 | 65.9 | 40.3 | 96.4 | 85.0 | Established market |
| 10 | Ningbo宁波 | 66.3 | 58.2 | 85.4 | 74.8 | 30.0 | Established market |
| 11 | Changsha长沙 | 64.0 | 78.8 | 57.4 | 74.8 | 30.0 | Established market |
| 12 | Nanjing南京 | 63.8 | 67.9 | 74.8 | 72.0 | 20.0 | Established market |
| 13 | Wuxi无锡 | 59.9 | 58.6 | 87.7 | 64.0 | 0.0 | Established market |
| 14 | Qingdao青岛 | 59.0 | 52.9 | 66.7 | 74.4 | 30.0 | Established market |
| 15 | Xiamen厦门 | 57.6 | 70.7 | 74.0 | 38.8 | 30.0 | Established market |
Scores are relative to the 51 cities in this release, not absolute. A 90 means “top decile of this dataset”, not “90% of a theoretical maximum”. Hong Kong and Macao are profiled but not scored — they sit outside the mainland platform ecosystem. Full table and method.
Single-metric leaderboards
Same city set, one metric at a time. Useful for media planning and for checking what the composite is hiding.
Largest by GDP
Gross regional product, reference year of each profile.
- $760B
- $702B
- $546B
- $453B
- $437B
- $390B
- $349B
- $324B
- $312B
- $264B
Largest by population
Permanent resident population of the administrative area — not the urban core.
- 31.9M
- 24.9M
- 21.9M
- 21.4M
- 18.9M
- 17.8M
- 13.8M
- 13.1M
- 13.0M
- 13.0M
Highest disposable income
Per-capita disposable income of urban residents. Provincial averages understate city cores.
- ¥88.4k
- ¥85.4k
- ¥74.8k
- ¥74.0k
- ¥74.0k
- ¥74.0k
- ¥73.6k
- ¥71.0k
- ¥70.0k
- ¥69.0k
Highest GDP per resident
GRP divided by resident population. Favours small, highly productive cities.
- ¥228k
- ¥224k
- ¥218k
- ¥217k
- ¥214k
- ¥194k
- ¥193k
- ¥190k
- ¥184k
- ¥179k
Highest Xiaohongshu penetration
Share of local internet users estimated active on the platform — YIVA estimate, not platform data.
- 58%
- 58%
- 55%
- 55%
- 52%
- 50%
- 50%
- 50%
- 48%
- 48%
Highest Douyin penetration
Same estimation basis. High Douyin is a content-commerce signal, not a premium signal.
- 85%
- 84%
- 84%
- 84%
- 83%
- 83%
- 83%
- 82%
- 82%
- 82%
Fastest growing
Year-on-year real GRP growth. Growth and scale rarely travel together.
- 6.5%
- 6.5%
- 6.2%
- 6.1%
- 6.0%
- 6.0%
- 6.0%
- 5.9%
- 5.9%
- 5.8%
Most policy access
Designations held out of four tracked: International Consumption Centre, Free Trade Zone, services opening-up pilot, Hainan offshore duty-free. Absolute points, not ranked.
- 85 pts · 3/4
- 85 pts · 3/4
- 85 pts · 3/4
- 85 pts · 3/4
- 65 pts · 3/4
- 65 pts · 3/4
- 50 pts · 2/4
- 50 pts · 2/4
- 50 pts · 2/4
- 50 pts · 2/4
Reading these tables
- City GDP is not consumer spending power. Chongqing has the fourth-largest GDP in the set and one of the lowest disposable incomes — a big economy with a thin premium segment.
- Population counts the whole administrative area, which for Chongqing includes a rural hinterland the size of Austria.
- Platform penetration is a share of internet users, so it cannot exceed 100% and it does not tell you ad reach, frequency or cost.
- A high score is not a recommendation. Entry order also depends on category maturity, competitor density and your margin structure.
- Policy is the one pillar scored on an absolute scale, not a relative one: it counts four published designations (International Consumption Centre, Free Trade Zone, services opening-up pilot, Hainan offshore duty-free). It is the only pillar that can separate two cities with identical economics.
Download the full dataset
Every scored city and province as JSON or CSV, including derived metrics and YCEI pillar scores. Free with a YIVA account — the key takes about a minute to create.
/api/public/dataset?file=china-cities.json/api/public/dataset?file=china-cities.csv/api/public/dataset?file=china-provinces.json/api/public/dataset?file=china-provinces.csvcurl -H "Authorization: Bearer $YIVA_API_KEY" \
"https://yivadigital.com/api/public/dataset?file=china-cities.json"Licence: CC BY 4.0 — attribution to YIVA Digital, link to this guide. Official statistics remain the property of the National Bureau of Statistics. The release excludes YIVA's qualitative entry notes and business-district lists; those stay in the city profiles.
Cite this page
YIVA Digital. “China City Rankings 2025 — YIVA China City Entry Index.” YIVA Digital, 2025. https://yivadigital.com/tool/china-market-guide/rankings
Relative index over 51 cities. Scores are not comparable across annual releases.
Definitions, units and source agencies are on the methodology page. Corrections to a single city figure are welcome — they are applied to the next refresh.