County-controlled city
A county-administered city/ county-controlled city (Chinese: 縣轄市; pinyin: xiànxiáshì) is a third level administrative division of Taiwan. On the same level as a Taiwanese township, it is the lowest-level city of Taiwan, below provincial city and special municipality. There are 14 county-controlled cities currently. A county-controlled city has urban villages (里) directly under it.
The two criteria of gaining county-administered city status:
The population criterion was originally 50,000 in the 1940s, but was raised to 100,000 in 1959, again in 1977 to 150,000, and in 2015 it was lower back to 100,000.
At first, in late January 1946, there were only two county-controlled cities: Hualien and Yilan, which were both prefecture-controlled cities (州轄市) under Japanese Rule. (The ROC government did not create such cities on the Mainland before they relocated to Taiwan.) Currently Changhua County and Chiayi County have the most county-controlled cities with two each. For current county-controlled cities, see the table below:
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