Shanghai's population heads to 22.5 million in 2020

Shanghai's population will keep rising, reaching 21.4 million in 2015 and 22.5 million in 2020, officials from the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission said Tuesday.

As of last year, the city had 19.21 million residents, including the registered population and migrant people staying here for over six months.

However, for a city striving to become an international financial and shipping hub, the experts said, there was one disquieting statistic:

Shanghai has only 198,000 financial staffers, about 1 percent of the population.

That's a much lower figure than the 770,000 professionals, or 3.5 percent of residents, in New York. And lower, too, than the 350,000 professionals, or 5 percent of residents, in Hong Kong.

The city population is also characterized by an imbalance between old and young, Leng Xiliang, of the population commission's policy research department, told a population forum yesterday.

"A healthy structure should have similar percentage of the elderly and minors, and their total number should be no more than half of the total population," Leng said.

But local registered people aged 60 or older make up more than 22 percent of the population, while those aged 14 and younger in 2008 were only 8.4 percent of the population.

"Of course Shanghai has a large number of migrant workers, who are in their 20s and 30s, to solve labor shortages and help balance the population structure by some extent," he said.

The experts said Shanghai's population density was moving in a healthy direction.

Downtown population density within the Inner Ring Road dropped by 16 percent in the past five years while the population density outside the Outer Ring Road rose by 31 percent.

Within the Inner Ring Road, the density is now 30,084 persons per square kilometer - 5,535 persons fewer than five years earlier. Outside the Outer Ring Road, the population rose by 2.5 million in the past five years, with the density increasing to 1,868 persons per square kilometer, 440 persons more in the past five years.

The city government is developing new sub-centers in districts of Qingpu, Songjiang and Jiading to shift population from the crowded downtown to the outskirts for a better population distribution.

Nationally, China's urban population is on pace to surpass its rural population for the first time in 2015, with the number of Chinese living in towns and cities set to top 700 million, the National Population and Family Planning Commission said over the weekend.

China is likely to have 1.39 billion citizens by 2015, up from 1.32 billion at the end of 2008, according to the national population commission.

Source: Shanghaidaily.com