Chongqing
A 32-million-person municipality engineered by Beijing in 1997 to manage Three Gorges resettlement — niche construction at sovereign scale that turned a statistical artefact into China's 4th-largest economy.
Chongqing's administrative boundaries contain 32 million people across 82,400 square kilometres — an area the size of Austria — yet its actual urban core houses roughly 9 million. The gap between those numbers is the story. When Beijing carved Chongqing out of Sichuan Province in 1997 to create China's fourth direct-controlled municipality, the decision had less to do with recognising an existing megacity than with engineering a new one.
The Three Gorges Dam, then under construction 660 kilometres downstream, would displace 1.3 million people, and Beijing needed a single administrative authority to manage the resettlement, the compensation payments, and the economic development that would follow. Folding 30 million rural and semi-urban residents into a municipality gave Chongqing both the political rank to negotiate directly with central government and the statistical heft to attract investment — a city of 30 million sounds more compelling to multinational manufacturers than a city of 9 million surrounded by countryside.
The strategy worked. Chongqing's GDP reached ¥3.2 trillion ($442 billion) in 2024, surpassing Guangzhou to become China's fourth-largest economy, growing at 5.7% while coastal peers slowed. The automobile sector produced 2.5 million vehicles in 2024, with new energy vehicles surging 90.5% to 953,000 units. Changan Automobile, headquartered here, partnered with Huawei through subsidiary Seres to produce electric vehicles that compete nationally.
The city's geography explains both its wartime resilience — Japan never reached Chongqing during eight years as China's provisional capital from 1937 to 1945, protected by the gorges and mountains that made ground assault impossible — and its modern infrastructure challenge. This is niche construction at sovereign scale: Beijing didn't discover Chongqing's economic potential, it manufactured it by redrawing administrative boundaries, directing investment through the Great Western Development programme, and using the Three Gorges resettlement as a catalyst for urbanisation. The biological parallel is the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, which solves network-optimisation problems by extending its body across terrain — not by concentrating mass in one location, but by connecting dispersed nodes into a functional whole.