(Yicai Global) Sept. 4 -- Nearly one third of Chinese large cities contributed 70.4 percent of the country's total gross domestic product in 2019, according to Yicai Global's calculations.

One hundred cities, out of around 330 cities above prefectural level, had a combined GDP of CNY69.8 trillion (USD10.2 trillion) last year.

The top five metropolises were Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chongqing with a GDP of more than CNY2 trillion (USD292.4 billion) each. Another 12 had GDP of over CNY1 trillion, headed by Suzhou and Chengdu which were close to the CNY2 trillion mark. And 28 had GDP of over CNY500 billion (USD73.1 billion). Fuyang in eastern Anhui province scraped into 100th place with a GDP of CNY270.5 billion.

Prefecture-level cities are bigger and more economically developed than county-level cities. Four of the cities, namely, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, are on the provincial level, directly administered by the central government. The other 96 cities were spread across 23 provinces. Only four provinces did not make the list. These were Hainan, Qinghai as well as the Ningxia Hui and Tibet Autonomous Regions.

Jiangsu, part of the Yangtze River Delta economic hub, had the most cities on the list with 13, led by its capital Suzhou which had the sixth highest GDP. Shandong in northeastern China had the second greatest number of cities on the list with 11. Guangdong in southeastern China came third with 10.

Over half of the cities were on China's east coast, at 55. Twenty-six were in central China, 15 in the west of the country and only four, Dalian, Shenyang, Changchun and Harbin, were in northeastern China.

The economy in northeastern China lags far behind the rest of the country and cannot support the development of prefecture-level cities, said Yi Baozhong, a professor at the Northeast Asian Research Institute of Jilin University.

Editor: Kim Taylor