In a blog post from last summer, we looked at some interesting facts about China and compared it to Europe and the USA. From the image below, you can get the basic point we made back then – China is very big and the population is more than twice that of the European Union. In today’s post, we’re going to focus in on Beijing (which means ‘northern capital’) – the venue for our international conference in June this year.
Beijing is an amazing city – or city region, if you prefer to look at it like that – and is possibly best described in the first instance by using some numbers…
- 19,612,368 – population of Beijing municipality at the time of the 2010 Census. This is almost the same as the population of Romania and about 3 million more than live in The Netherlands, our last conference host nation.
- 16 – the number of districts within the Beijing municipality. For comparison, New York City has 5 Boroughs, London has 33 districts (32 Boroughs + the City of London), Paris has 20 arrondissements.
- 3,500,000 – population of Chaoyang District, the most highly populated district within Beijing.
- 8.1% – Beijing’s GDP growth in 2011.
- 30°C (86°F) – average daily high temperature in June in Beijing.
- 1,266 – km from Beijing to Shanghai (787 miles). That’s about the same distance as Madrid to Paris.
- 10 – time in minutes it will take you to walk from the conference hotel to the Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium if you are going to the conference.
- 40 – degrees north of the Equator is the latitude of Beijing. This is the roughly the same as New York City, Madrid and Ankara.
- 0 – number of times the Regional Studies Association has hosted a Beijing conference in the past. It should be a very exciting new experience for us all!
For those who are going to Beijing, we look forward to seeing you there. For those who can’t make it, we promise we’ll report back on how we get on…