How to download the county boundaries of China in OpenStreetMap?

Question

Is there a way to download the shp format file about eh county boundaries of China in OpenStreetMap?

Answer 1

You can get the administrative boundary via the Overpass API. The corresponding query is:

relation
  ["boundary"="administrative"]
  ["admin_level"="2"]
  ["name:en"="People's Republic of China"];
(._;>;);
out body;

In order to learn more about the specified tags take a look at the OSM wiki. Especially on relations with the administrative_boundary tag.

The returned XML file has to be converted to a shapefile afterwards.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if the shp files package also contains the boundary:
http://download.geofabrik.de/asia/china.html

Otherwise get the .poly file and convert it.

Please keep in mind, that political boundaries are a bit problematic and might get abused for different kinds of vandalism or political debates and result in inconsistency.