Chongqing had 32,054,159 residents in China’s 2020 census.
That figure counts the entire Chongqing municipality, an enormous administrative region covering 82,403 square kilometres. Unlike many city figures, it includes extensive rural areas as well as the dense urban core along the Yangtze and Jialing rivers.
Chongqing is one of China’s four municipalities directly governed by the central government, alongside Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. It was separated from Sichuan province and re-established as a centrally administered municipality in 1997, helping coordinate development in southwestern China.
A common mix-up is comparing Chongqing’s administrative population with the populations of compact urban municipalities such as Shanghai. In the 2020 census, Chongqing also surpassed Shanghai in urban population, although the two places use very different administrative boundaries. The municipality is a major manufacturing, transport, and economic centre in the upper Yangtze region.