曹县, a county under 荷泽, is probably better known to the Chinese netizens than the latter. For a while, netizens were using 曹县 instead of 朝鲜 to mean North Korea for either censorship evasion or mockeries.I am answering here cause not to derail flagship thread.
It's not really a city of 8.8m ppl. On a prefecture level yes, but prefecture is not really a city in what people think about the city. Core urban area(metro) of Heze is probably less than 2 m ppl. Besides this you have many county lvl cities and big rural areas inside the border of prefecture. Look how huge the area is for the whole prefecture