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.
Which contributes more to the conversation: using a silly date format and calculating how many times bigger Wuxi is than Birmingham and how its growth and historical development relates to the overall boom in renewable energy, or derailing a thread about renewable energy by posting "I have no idea what your point is" and "Pedantry of the nth level"? Which one produces a conversation you'd rather be involved in?
Look, if you and I are talking about the population of Birmingham, but instead of speaking normally you are signing your comments to the tune of "Never gonna give you up", I'm not going to reply to anything about Birmingham. I'm going to go "Uh, what's with the singing, are you OK?"
I think you got what you wanted, which was to show to everybody how cool you are with your long now dates, and the conversation is exactly where you wanted it. You're welcome, happy to serve!
> you are signing[sic] your comments to the tune of "Never gonna give you up", I'm not going to reply to anything about Birmingham. I'm going to go "Uh, what's with the singing, are you OK?"
Do you really think "What's with the singing?" would be a positive contribution as a response to any of those? More generally, is mindless conformism ever a positive contribution anywhere? Where could it be more unworthy than on a site named "Hacker News", founded to celebrate the achievements of nonconformists? Who appointed you to the Committee to Suppress Playfulness? Have you never heard that "hacking" is "the playful application of ingenuity"?
> show to everybody how cool you are
Using silly date formats is not a good measure of being "cool". Helping people understand things they didn't understand before—for example, by making substantive contributions to a discussion—is a good measure of being "cool".
> the conversation is exactly where you wanted it
Obviously enough, your comments are motivated by your internal motivations, not mine.
I think you're missing the guy moved there in 2000 not 2010 or 2019. Birmingham, probably a smaller city in it's own right anyways (England doesn't really have "big city" outside London), has probably not grown any significant amount in 20 years. I wouldn't be surprised if Wuxi more than doubled.
20:1 would be "Wuxi City" (i.e. prefecture where the 6.5 million comes from) as a whole to Birmingham the traditional "city proper" westerners would think. Looking at the actual data on that... 4628/268=17.2x - not bad for a swag :).
Again my point isn't "Birmingham is big stronk western city put puny Asian city shame" it's probably 3 fold at this point:
1) If you put Birmingham the city proper in urban China people would be saying it's a small city.
2) What people call a "city" in the west is usually vastly smaller than some of the places with "city" in the name in China, as such googling "population of <x> city" and comparing it to familiar "population of <y> city" is just going to confuse people more than help them understand how big these places are.
3) Wuxi is going to be a lot smaller in 2000 when the story was taking place than today, western cities don't have that kind of powerhouse growth anymore where you have to think when the event happened not just where.
.
Maybe you still disagree with my conclusion, and that's fine, mostly I wanted to get these 3 concepts out there regardless where the reader ends up on the matter.
Those are good points. Surely #1 and #3 are correct.
I think we agree on the central point: that rags like the Grauniad systematically understate the sizes of urbanizations in China, in a variety of ways. We might disagree on why, and what the effect is.
As for #2, the question of what to call a "city" is sort of more about the cultural practices of translators than about patterns of urban growth. People in China mostly don't call Wuxi a "city"; I think they call it a 市 (the administrative unit), a 地级市 (the larger administrative unit Wuxi Prefecture), a 城市 (the social phenomenon), a 都市, or a 城. How the Guardian chooses to describe Wuxi for their English-speaking readers, mostly outside China, is really the question here.
You seem to be suggesting that writers draw the English-language line between "town" and "city" at a larger population level when they're talking about Chinese cities than when they're talking about cities in, say, England. I think you're correct. I picked three smaller "cities" in Jiangsu from Wikipedia to see how the English-speaking press describes them: Pizhou (population 163k; nytimes: "a village in Jiangsu Province in eastern China"), Yangzhong (pop. 344k; Grauniad: "a county-level city in Jiangsu province", "Yangzhong city"), and Jintan (564k; BBC: "the town of Jintan").
Wuxi has probably more than doubled since 02000, as you say, and Birmingham surely hasn't. However, even in 02000 I don't know if it was a "small city" in any absolute sense (rather than compared to Suzhou and Shanghai). Its population was surely already larger and denser than Birmingham's.
Some Western cities do have that kind of powerhouse growth; a bit of searching turns up Toluca, The Woodlands (arguably still too small to be a "city"), Brasilia, and Las Vegas. Their growth rates are in the same neighborhood as Wuxi's over the last 20 years. Brasilia, for example, has grown from 2.0 million in 02000 to 3.0 million today, 4.3 million in the metro area.
However, I'm not sure I understand your concern about how making these comparisons is "just going to confuse people." What kind of information do you think would be more useful for understanding how big Wuxi is than knowing that its population exceeds that of, for example, Mongolia, Puerto Rico, or any metropolitan area in Germany, and that the population density in its center is half that of Manhattan but three times that of Birmingham? If someone is led by the "small city" terminology to think that Wuxi is similar in size to Johnstown, PA (pop. 25000), or Wiesbaden (pop. 291000, metro area over half a million), they're already confused; wouldn't "googling population of Wuxi and comparing it to familiar population of <y> city" clear that right up?
At least after you cut through the terminological ambiguity of whether "Wuxi" means Liangxi Qu, the five districts of Wuxi City, or the whole Wuxi prefecture, and the analogous ambiguity of where to draw the limits of "London" (the Square Mile?) or "Sydney" or whatever familiar city you're comparing to, it seems like you'd be less confused after making those comparisons, rather than more confused.
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