Not merely the rapid growth of the metropolitan cities in the Third World but the overconcentration of the political and administrative functions together with the economic, social and cultural activities within the metropolitan regions — in short: the primacy —should be considered as the essential component of the term “metropolization”. An accurate computation of the metropolitan population growth in China is difficult because of the frequent change of city area delimitations after 1953 in connection with the missing distinction between shiqu-, jiaoqu- and hsien-population in the statistics. Therefore a solid assessment of the Chinese policy to restrict the growth of the metropolitan cities seems to be impossible. Recent data reveal that there is still a strong primacy for the metropolitan cities together with a heavy concentration of this primacy in the historical core regions. The evaluation indicates that the efforts towards balanced regional development and reduction of the regional disparities could not be considered as successful so far.