---
title: "2018 Ranking of China's New First-Tier Cities Released: Where Is Your Ideal City?"
description: "Cities are products of human aggregation. As people flock into cities, these spatial entities gain immense power. Yet, growing environmental and social issues remind urban planners, operators, and citizens to ponder: what makes an ideal city? Using increasingly rich urban data, an evaluation system can be built to outline the ideal city. Based on the latest year's commercial data from 170 brands, user behavior data from 19 internet companies, and big data from data institutions, CBN's New First-Tier Cities Research Institute ranked 338 cities at or above prefecture level in China."
author: "New Distribution"
publisher: "New Distribution"
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published: "2018-05-02"
language: "en"
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# 2018 Ranking of China's New First-Tier Cities Released: Where Is Your Ideal City?

> Cities are products of human aggregation. As people flock into cities, these spatial entities gain immense power. Yet, growing environmental and social issues remind urban planners, operators, and citizens to ponder: what makes an ideal city? Using increasingly rich urban data, an evaluation system can be built to outline the ideal city. Based on the latest year's commercial data from 170 brands, user behavior data from 19 internet companies, and big data from data institutions, CBN's New First-Tier Cities Research Institute ranked 338 cities at or above prefecture level in China.

Cities are products of human aggregation. As people flock into cities, these spatial entities gain immense power. Yet, growing environmental and social issues remind urban planners, operators, and citizens to ponder: what makes an ideal city?
To this day, it remains difficult to summarize the answer in words. Therefore, leveraging increasingly rich urban data may help establish an evaluation system for cities, sketching the contours of people's ideal city.
Based on the latest year's commercial data from 170 brands, user behavior data from 19 internet companies, and big data from data institutions, CBN's New First-Tier Cities Research Institute ranked 338 cities at or above prefecture level in China.
To ensure continuity and comparability, this 2018 City Commercial Charm Ranking retained the five indicators from the previous year: agglomeration of commercial resources, urban centrality, urbanite activity, lifestyle diversity, and future potential, maintaining the original algorithm framework: first-level index weights are scored by the expert committee of the New First-Tier Cities Research Institute, while data below the second-level index use principal component analysis.
The comprehensive calculation results show that the four first-tier cities have swapped positions within their two tiers—from "Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen" to "Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou." The 15 "new first-tier" cities also saw some changes in ranking: Chengdu, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Wuhan, Suzhou, Xi'an, Tianjin, Nanjing, Zhengzhou, Changsha, Shenyang, Qingdao, Ningbo, Dongguan, and Wuxi.
Since the release of the China City Commercial Charm Ranking, the ranking of first-tier cities has changed for the first time in three years, with Beijing no longer firmly holding the top spot. In the future potential index, which represents talent attraction and innovation, Beijing still ranks first, but its urbanite activity index dropped one place compared to last year.
Shenzhen's commercial charm index surpassed Guangzhou this year, becoming the third on the list. Besides leading in patent numbers for years, its GDP exceeded 2 trillion yuan in 2017. Shenzhen's inclusiveness and the innovative soil it cultivates make its sustained upward growth more prominent among China's first-tier cities.
Among new first-tier cities, Wuxi returned after a year of dormancy; Chongqing, Suzhou, and Zhengzhou have risen in ranking for three consecutive years. Meanwhile, northeastern cities continue to decline: Shenyang dropped one place, and Dalian fell out of the new first-tier list, landing at 21st, behind Kunming.
More and more cities are fully aware that talent is the core of urban development. Early this year, new first-tier cities like Nanjing, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Xi'an, and Wuhan successively introduced new talent policies to attract college graduates and professionals to settle. This is a "talent war" and a scramble for the core elements of urban development.
Diverse and open urban spaces and innovative talent are mutually reinforcing. For all cities, the path to development may not lie in chasing current industrial trends. By gathering and attracting the best talent and resources and preparing before new opportunities arise, cities can maximize their energy at the right time. This is also the value upheld by CBN's New First-Tier Cities Research Institute in setting the algorithm for the China City Commercial Charm Index.
Urban renewal and governance require a gradual process. Whether bottom-up or top-down, city managers should think like business operators, understanding supply and demand in the market, what diverse spaces and lifestyles urbanites truly want, why people abandon their hometowns to come to a city, and what ideal city they seek.
Based on this, we can fit all our imaginations of a better life into the complex and interesting organism of the city and live in a truly "ideal city" in the future.
The following explains the specific dimensions and calculation methods of the five indicators:
**| A Agglomeration of Commercial Resources |**
Using the most astute and cautious logic of store location selection in the commercial world to judge a city's quality was a method we deemed feasible when we proposed the concept of "new first-tier cities" five years ago. Now, this method has been further upgraded.
Through spatial algorithms, we classify urban commercial spaces into three categories based on the density of commercial resources: areas with brand stores are the broadest urban zones, areas with relative agglomeration effects are urban commercial districts, and the densest areas of commercial brands are core business circles. The size of business circles and city scale do not affect scores; in the core commercial index, we only consider the agglomeration benefits brought by brand presence.
Multi-center commercial cities like Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Wuhan score higher in urban commercial district strength. Hangzhou's core business circle strength ranks first among new first-tier cities, with the connected Wulin Square and emerging West Lake lakeside business circle, together with Qianjiang New City, forming Hangzhou's strongest core commercial area.
In this year's agglomeration of commercial resources, we still examine big brand preference—how big brands choose cities represents their recognition of the city's commercial quality atmosphere. Chengdu remains the preferred city for big brands in the southwest, with its total number of consumer brand stores exceeding Guangzhou and other new first-tier cities for three consecutive years. Additionally, within the statistical scope, Chongqing added 158 brand stores in the past year, the best growth momentum among new first-tier cities.
Beyond these, we cannot ignore the basic commerce growing in the city's capillaries, which is closer to urbanites' lives and where commodity exchanges are most frequent.
**| B Urban Centrality |**
If inter-city connections are likened to a network, each city is a node. Cities with strong radiation transmit more goods, resources, and talent to surrounding cities, while weaker ones often passively receive radiation. This transmission capacity—centrality—is one of the city's key competitive advantages.
Transportation is the material foundation connecting cities. In this dimension, we consider intercity transportation infrastructure data such as the number of high-speed rail stations, cities directly reachable by civil aviation, and the number of highways passing through. We also use intercity travel matrices between city pairs via rail, aviation, and highways to calculate each city's centrality in the transportation network.
This year's logistics accessibility index added data on parcels sent and received by each city, in addition to the number of logistics outlets. Jinhua, the prefecture-level city where Yiwu is located, performed well, ranking second in parcels sent, only behind Guangzhou, a first-tier city with developed logistics.
The regional center index of commercial resources calculates the sum of connections between each city's commercial brands and other cities in its region. In South China, Guangzhou and Shenzhen; in the southwest, Chengdu and Chongqing; in the northeast, Shenyang and Dalian have relatively balanced commercial resource distribution, while Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, and Xi'an have absolute advantages in their respective regions.
**| C Urbanite Activity |**
No model of an ideal city can ignore human behavior in the city.
The consumption activity index is a basic indicator of whether urbanites are active, reflecting their purchasing power and the city's ability to provide commercial services both online and offline. The Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region performs prominently in this dimension. Nine of the top ten cities in per capita online shopping purchase frequency are from this region. Among them, Hangzhou ranks first, surpassing the four first-tier cities. Chengdu, Wuhan, and Chongqing are the new first-tier cities with the largest daily movie-viewing scale, with sufficient population providing ample potential customers for local movie consumption.
Nighttime activity monitors not only the vitality of the city at night but also the potential for economic benefits and social output. By region, South China and East China are the most active at night. Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Dongguan are the most active new first-tier cities at night.
The restlessness index measures a city's desire to grow and renew upward, representing a positive lifestyle. Chengdu has the highest restlessness index among new first-tier cities. Chengdu residents are willing to share their travel records on travel platforms, quickly adopt new shared bikes, and maintain high daily cycling activity data.
**| D Lifestyle Diversity |**
Lifestyle should be an individual choice for each urbanite, but an ideal city must have millions of different life postures, which constitute the city's diverse and inclusive character and temperament, and become its most important charm.
People's highly personalized lifestyle choices in the city cannot be separated from three elements: space, activities, and commerce. Therefore, this year we reconstructed the algorithm framework for the lifestyle diversity index, measuring this index closely related to urbanites' life perceptions from three aspects: freshness of going out, richness of leisure, and diversity of consumption.
Places such as restaurants, cafes, sports venues, bookstores, museums, and cinemas provide "third spaces" beyond work and residence, where people converse with familiar or unfamiliar people, exchange information, and spark inspiration. Leaving home and office, these outdoor activity spaces offering "freshness of going out" are where meaningful social activities occur.
More people are starting to run, exercise, read, listen to music, and travel. These leisure activity data can be used to measure the richness of urbanites' leisure.
Through movie box office, willingness to pay on music apps, diversity of products purchased on Taobao, preference for star-rated hotels, and willingness to buy travel products, we can observe the diverse consumption types of urbanites. Data shows that Chengdu, Nanjing, and Hangzhou are more willing to spend on music than other cities.
**| E Future Potential |**
The future potential index attempts to observe how much imagination and plasticity a city can offer people in the future. We try to observe two forces that influence young people's employment and settlement: a good entrepreneurial atmosphere, working environment, and like-minded partners attract young people to the city; while urban diseases such as air pollution and traffic congestion force people to choose between survival and life. In this tug-of-war between pull and push, the former has a more dominant influence.
Innovation capability is an important part of a city's plasticity potential, with startups being one of the main innovation entities. Hangzhou and Chengdu rank only behind first-tier cities in the number of startup platforms and financing scale, making them the best new first-tier cities for entrepreneurship.
Universities are the main and most stable source of talent, but this does not mean cities have more talent. Nanjing has the richest source of quality university students among new first-tier cities, but it also faces a low graduate retention rate. The core of a city's competitiveness is to make people stay.
This index also considers the attention to product information and membership status in urbanites' consumption behavior. Increasingly rational and quality-oriented consumption behaviors will bring new upgrade space to urban commerce.
The city's GDP and population data are also included here. Under the premise of considering the scale base, the ability of cities at different levels to break through their growth bottlenecks gives people confidence in the future and makes them believe in their choices.
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