All right, welcome back to the deep dive.
So today we're tackling um a really critical mission.
We really are.
Today we are taking a look at something that for decades
has felt like an unstoppable force of nature, the growth of China's cities.
But we're doing it with a question that frankly turns a lot of that conventional wisdom on its head.
A pretty fundamental question really.
Has the great urban expansion of China already stopped?
Are we right now living in a world of peak city?
It's a question that has I think profound implications for
well pretty much anyone tracking the global economy.
For years the story has been so simple, so linear,
it's been this unstoppable demographic wave moving from the countryside to the skyscraper.
It was the one-way ticket.
Exactly.
But to really get to the bottom of this you have to look past the official statistics,
the ones that get reported everywhere, and you have to dig into something a little more fundamental.
You have to ask how we globally actually define what a city is.
And when you do that.
When you apply an internationally consistent standard the answer is well it's pretty staggering.