[Thank you !
I admit and stand corrected about Wuhan population density.
Correction appreciated ! ]
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
As I understand it, Mao's conquest involved physical destruction
of many Chinese written genealogical records.
The destruction was needed to move much of the agrarian population to the cities
and off their ancestral lands.
Is this true, ..or was I misinformed ?