On the morning of November 14, 2015, Shanghai Academy held a symposium themed “Shanghai’s Population Control Research”, discussing issues about Shanghai’s population control policies and directions. Zhang Chewei, head of the “Shanghai’s Population Control Research” project team and Director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, CASS, Zhang Yina, President of Shanghai Population Association, Li Youmei, First Vice President of Shanghai Academy, Wen Xueguo, Executive Vice President of Shanghai Academy, as well as relevant experts including Zhu Qin, Ding Jinhong and Wu Ruijun attended the meeting.
At the symposium, the experts held discussions on three themes: i) The nature of Shanghai’s population issue and the issues related to population that the government needs to redefine, ii) the problems in Shanghai’s current population control policies and necessary adjustments, and iii) future directions for Shanghai’s population control.
Zhang Chewei noted that population concentration is an inevitable result of a highly developed economy and society. Pure control over the population flow into Shanghai cannot solve the population problem facing the city; It not only goes against the philosophy of the CPC Central Committee concerning human-oriented development, but would also damage the foundation for long term development of Shanghai’s economy. According to the comparison between Shanghai and other international metropolises in the same population range, Shanghai has shown a very high degree of urbanization and the population size is less likely to further expand.
Regarding the problems facing mega-cities, such as traffic congestion and competition for public resources, Zhang Yina considered that population control reduces permanent population in the statistical sense, but people’s activity levels increase significantly rather than decrease. Meanwhile, new urban zones are clearly designed to attract people, but most of them become dormitory cities like Tiantongyuan, Beijing. Wu Ruijun and Zhu Qin found that field investigations show that the controlled population just move to suburbs or flow among districts/counties, rather than leave Shanghai. The so-called population “control” typically turns out to be ineffective. Sun Changmin said, population control is not a good prescription for Shanghai, and the defective administrative system may deepen conflicts with law enforcement, which is not conducive to the benign development of the city.
Finally, the experts reached a consensus that, as a fundamental approach, Shanghai must “regulate” rather than “control” its population. That means it needs to redeploy some public resources related to employment, education and medical services from core urban areas to new towns or suburbs, so as to lower the population density in core areas, particularly the density of the floating population. Meanwhile, Shanghai must be guided by a longer-term goal for population development to build the scientific & technological innovation center and to realize construction as a metropolis in the real sense.
The investigation team will revise the research report according to experts’ opinions and give practicable consulting suggestions.
(Xiang Jing)
