Skip to content 
On October 21, Beijing time, the global management consulting firm AT Kearney released the “Global City Comprehensive Ranking” for 2024. In the list, almost all Chinese cities have risen in the global ranking, showing the strong resilience and potential of Chinese cities in economic development and internationalization.
Nanjing’s performance was particularly eye-catching, rising from 93rd place in the world last year to 83rd place this year. Not only did it have the largest improvement among the top 100 Chinese cities, it also set a record high ranking.
In this year’s “Global City Comprehensive Ranking”, a total of 31 Chinese cities were on the list, among which Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong ranked among the top 10 in the world, and 13 cities ranked among the top 100 in the world.
Among them, the Yangtze River Delta has become the city cluster with the most cities on the list this year. In addition to first-tier cities and major provincial capitals such as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou, Suzhou has entered the top 100 in the world for the first time, and Ningbo, Hefei, and Wuxi are among the top 150 in the world.
In this regard, Kearney pointed out in the “2024 Global Cities Index Report” that as a benchmark for China’s city clusters, the Yangtze River Delta has demonstrated outstanding resilience in the face of uncertainty in the global economy. As industrial supporting facilities continue to strengthen and exchanges and interconnections between cities become closer, the synergy between provincial capitals and surrounding cities in industries such as automobiles, new energy, high value-added industrial products, and consumer goods will be further deepened, achieving overall prosperity for the city cluster.
Compared with the “Global Innovation Index” released by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization and the “Global Livability Report” released by The Economist, Kearney’s “Global City Comprehensive Ranking” emphasizes the concept of “city”, including five dimensions such as business activities, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political affairs, with a total of 31 indicators. The measurement standards span the political, economic and cultural fields to evaluate the most influential and competitive cities in the world, quantify the advantages of the world’s leading cities, reveal the laws behind the global urbanization process, and show future trends.It is worth mentioning that in the current global urbanization process, digital capabilities, digital economy, digital service trade, etc. are strongly promoting the performance of urban business activities, thereby strengthening their core competitiveness. Taking into account the new driving factors in the current global urbanization development, this year’s “Global City Comprehensive Ranking” fine-tuned the evaluation index system, especially introducing two new indicators, Internet speed and number of data centers, to promote the rapid improvement of Nanjing’s city ranking.
