In 2015, the number of migrant residents living in Shanghai dropped for the first time in the past 15 years, Shanghai Television reported Monday.
It was also the first time Shanghai witnessed a decrease in its permanent population since China adopted the policy of reform and opening-up in 1978, Guo Feng, a research fellow at Shanghai Finance Institute, was quoted by news site wallstreetcn.com as saying on Tuesday.
By the end of 2015, Shanghai's population of migrant residents had decreased to 9.8 million, comprising 40.6 percent of the city's roughly 24 million permanent residents, according to statistics released by the Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau on Monday.
Upgrades to the country's industrial structure in which labor-intensive industries are being moved out of metropolitan areas contributed greatly to the demographic change, Peng Xizhe, dean of the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Shanghai-based Fudan University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
The promotion of urbanization in central and western China has also attracted many members of the labor force from coastal cities in East China to inland regions, where the cost of living is much lower, Peng explained.
Experts also noted that the population control policies adopted in recent years have started to pay off.
"Shanghai has taken a series of tough measures to curb population growth since 2014, including renovating urban villages and regulating group renting," Zhou Haiwang, an expert with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.
Low-skilled workers, a major group of people leaving Shanghai, have been "squeezed" out of the city as the threshold for living and working there has been raised, Peng said.
However, experts noted that first-tier Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai still provide more job opportunities and better social and public services than other cities. According to Peng, current population control policies can only "cure the symptoms but not the disease."
