all of which have populations of close to 100 million people. It is said that such enormous size puts a staggering burden on provincial governments, resulting in inefficiency and poor responsiveness to grassroots needs and desires, as well as inability to concentrate on specific areas of development. In addition, some proponents of province shrinking believe that the current size of larger provinces has given them too much bargaining power with the central government, and is a negative influence on the territorial integrity of China. Opponents of province shrinking believe that increasing the number of provinces would simply increase the inefficiency of governmental bureaucracy. They also believe that smaller provinces would make the coordination of pan-regional efforts more difficult and, consequently, affect economic development. Moreover, they believe that current provinces are important parts of identity for individual Chinese and should not be tampered with. A variation on this theme is a call to increase the number of municipalities by carving major cities out of the provinces, which would basically achieve the same effect. The recent establishment of Hainan province (out of Guangdong) and Chongqing municipality (out of Sichuan) can be seen as experiments along this vein. Proposals have been made for the municipality status of cities such as Guangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chengdu. Abolishing the prefecture level This proposal has recently gathered quite a lot of popularity. The reasons are based on the history of prefectures. By the constitution of China, provinces are supposed to govern counties directly—and prefectures (autonomous ones excepted) are neither mentioned nor endorsed. So when prefectures were originally being set up, they were an unofficial quasi-level to help provinces govern very large numbers of counties. As a result, prefectures are (unlike provinces or counties) often seen as nothing more than bureaucratic institutions. However, the constitution does allow for some cities, which are a constitutionally guaranteed level of administration, to be "prefecture-level" (in the sense that they can take surrounding counties under them), though the original intention was likely to have just a few very large cities in each province be prefecture-level cities that govern only the counties in their immediate suburbs. The rest of each province would still consist of counties under unofficial prefectures. (This was, in fact, the general situation before the 90's.) In recent years, however, there has been a trend to replace prefectures wholesale with prefecture-level cities. This takes advantage of the ambiguous wording