Chifeng
Chifeng's 346,654 urban residents coordinate a 4.32 million-person prefecture, turning 90,000 square kilometres of farms, prairie and mines into a dryland allocation problem.
Chifeng looks small only if you stare at the street grid. The urban core has about 346,654 residents, but the prefecture it administers covers roughly 90,000 square kilometres and 4.32 million people, the largest population in Inner Mongolia. Officially, it is a prefecture-level city in the southeast of the autonomous region at 570 metres elevation. Operationally, it is a dryland control room balancing cropland, prairie, forests, mines and county seats across a territory almost the size of Portugal.
The numbers explain why Chifeng cannot live off one label. Recent city profiles describe 1.4 million hectares of cultivated land, 5.73 million hectares of prairie, 2.87 million hectares of forest and more than 70 mineral types spread across roughly 1,200 sites. In 2024 GDP reached about RMB232.21 billion ($32.0 billion), with services accounting for roughly 53 percent of output but the primary sector still generating RMB48.03 billion. That mix means the municipal government is constantly deciding which landscape gets scarce water, roads, grid capacity and policy attention. Chifeng does not just run a city. It arbitrates between farming, grazing, mining, tourism and ecological repair.
That is the hidden mechanism. Value is generated across grassland, mines, farms and restoration zones, then pulled into county seats and the urban core for finance, processing and administration. This is source-sink dynamics spread over many counties. The risk is not a single-industry crash. It is coordination failure across too many land uses at once, especially as northern China becomes drier and anti-desertification work starts competing with production for the same land, labour and capital.
Biologically, Chifeng resembles an octopus. An octopus can run semi-independent limbs while one nervous system keeps the whole animal coherent. Chifeng does the municipal version through source-sink dynamics, resource allocation and niche construction: it keeps redesigning the boundary between grazing, farming, mining and restoration rather than settling into one identity.