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| County 县 Xiàn | |
|---|---|
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| Category | Third leveladministrative division of aunitary state |
| Location | People's Republic of China |
| Found in | Prefectures,Provinces |
| Number | 1,319 (1,307 controlled, 11 claimed) (as of 2023) |
| Government |
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| Subdivisions | |
| County | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chinese name | |||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 县 | ||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 縣 | ||||||||
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| Tibetan name | |||||||||
| Tibetan | རྫོང་། (formerly 宗 in Chinese) | ||||||||
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| Zhuang name | |||||||||
| Zhuang | Yen | ||||||||
| Korean name | |||||||||
| Hangul | 현 | ||||||||
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| Mongolian name | |||||||||
| Mongolian Cyrillic | Шянь | ||||||||
| Mongolian script | ᠰᠢᠶᠠᠨ | ||||||||
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| Uyghur name | |||||||||
| Uyghur | ناھىيە | ||||||||
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| Manchu name | |||||||||
| Manchu script | ᡥᡳᠶᠠᠨ | ||||||||
| Möllendorff | hiyan | ||||||||
| Kazakh name | |||||||||
| Kazakh | اۋدان аудан audan | ||||||||
| Kyrgyz name | |||||||||
| Kyrgyz | وودان оодан oodan | ||||||||
| Daur name | |||||||||
| Daur | guas | ||||||||
| Oroqen name | |||||||||
| Oroqen | jaamun | ||||||||
| Administrative divisions of China |
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Analogous county level units Management areas Management committee |
Analogous township level units Management areas Management committee Farms area (Overseas Chinese Farm Region [zh]),Prison area,University towns, etc. |
(Grassroots Autonomous Organizations) Villages · Gaqa · Ranches Residential Committees |
History:before 1912,1912–49,1949–present Administrative division codes |
Counties (县) are found in thethird level of the administrative hierarchy inprovinces andautonomous regions and the second level inmunicipalities andHainan, a level that is known as "county level" and also containsautonomous counties,county-level cities,banners,autonomous banners andcity districts. There are 1,355 counties inmainland China out of a total of 2,851 county-level divisions.
The termxian is sometimes translated as "district" or "prefecture" when put in the context ofChinese history.
Xian have existed since theWarring States period and were set up nationwide by theQin dynasty.[1][2] The number of counties inChina proper gradually increased from dynasty to dynasty. AsQin Shi Huang reorganized the counties after his unification, there were about 1,000. Under the EasternHan dynasty, the number of counties increased to above 1,000. About 1400 existed when theSui dynasty abolished thecommandery level (郡 jùn), which was the level just above counties, and demoted some commanderies to counties. The current number ofcounties mostly resembled that of the later years ofQing dynasty. Changes of location and names of counties inChinese history have been a major field of research in Chinese historical geography, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s.[citation needed]
In Imperial China, the county was a significant administrative unit because it marked the lowest level of the imperial bureaucratic structure;[citation needed] in other words, it was the lowest level that the government reached. Government below the county level was often undertaken through informal non-bureaucratic means, varying between dynasties. The head of a county was themagistrate, who oversaw both the day-to-day operations of the county as well as civil and criminal cases.
During the Republican period, counties were the second level administrative divisions of its provinces. After the Chinese Civil War, counties became subordinate to prefectural level cities while the previous structure is retained. The counties became directly governed by theExecutive Yuan after the provinces became streamlined in 1998, but they were fully abolished in 2018.
Autonomous counties (自治县;zìzhìxiàn) are a special class of counties inmainland China reserved for non-Han Chineseethnic minorities. Autonomous counties are found all over China, and are given, by law, more legislative power than regular counties.
There are 117 autonomous counties in mainland China.
As theChinese Communist Party (CCP) is central to directing government policy in mainland China, every level of administrative division has a local CCP committee. A county's[clarification needed] is called thesecretary (中共县委书记), thede facto highest office of the county. Policies are carried out via thepeople's government of the county, and its head is called the county governor (县长). The governor is often also one of the deputy secretaries in the CCP Committee.