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[Thank you !
I admit and stand corrected about Wuhan population density.
Correction appreciated ! ]

You’re not the only person with this misconception about Chinese population density. I had this discussion with a Chinese participant on some English language defense-oriented forum ages ago where I said Chinese cities were more vulnerable in a nuclear exchange, and he contended that American cities were more vulnerable. At that point, Wikipedia was at its infancy, but relative population densities were available. So I looked up the numbers and - lo and behold - he was right, and I was wrong.

It actually stands to reason - China is a lot more agrarian than the US is, which would imply that the population is far more spread out, on average. Country-wide, China has a higher population density. But a big chunk of China’s population still resides in the sticks, so most areas aren’t particularly densely populated by American urban standards.

There’s also the fact that, historically-speaking, just about every square foot of Chinese land has been populated and cultivated intensively, whereas American settlers were moving to a mostly empty land. So simple tradition stands in the way of American-style city population densities - for residents of a given area, their ancestral graveyards are rooted in areas their lineal forebears have populated for possibly thousands of years. The importance of ancestral worship in the Chinese tradition may have acted as a counterbalance to the centripetal pull of the 10m and up regional agglomerations that the Chinese call “cities”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestor_veneration_in_China