>>1825605The Greater Tokyo Area currently has a population of 38 million. Its ONE big urban area only made possible trough extensive usage of mass transportation and public infrastructure.
Why is Tokyo brought up? Because the next cities on ranking lists is fucking small compared to Tokyo, because their governments generally lack the stomach to build enough support infrastructure to even allow such a massive area.
You can create a megacity, but the footprint expands exponentially, especially as you quickly need extensive systems of commute as car centric cities quickly cap out on populations of just a few millions due footprint.
The CCP is in a position where they know that when the rural primary economy is fully mechanized, there isn't going to be work left rurally. And as rural areas are limited by geographical niches, you can't really reach into the higher levels of manufacture or technology there.
So what do you do? You graph a few graphs, make a few charts, and realize what you want to do is to potentially build several Tokyo's, and ideally place HSR "suburbs" before you get slums or population congestion. And since China is FUCKING HUGE, you need this to happen before you get a complete depopulation of everything that is inland but not supported by the larger river systems.
Its not a matter of "building new cities",
its a matter of trying to get ahead of the game to avoid slumming and all the horrible social consequences it brings to urban areas. While at the same time space out the cities in such a manner that entire regions don't get left behind over the next decades as the primary economy can't sustain rural population.
