Shanghai Street View: Resident Expats 沪经动向：外国居民
If the number of foreigners living in a city is the best measure of how international it is, then Shanghai is rapidly overtaking Beijing as China’s most global city. For years Beijing held the title as home to China’s biggest expatriate population, drawing on its big diplomatic, business and international student communities to easily take the crown in most of the 3 decades of the Reform Era. But then Shanghai began its own rapid development in the 1990s, nearly a decade after Beijing, and started quietly building up its own expat community centered much more in the white collar business crowd.
The city formerly known for its huge foreign influence has gone on to quietly pass Beijing in terms of total expat numbers, and that fact was on display once again when newly installed city government leaders discussed the latest figures during a recent meeting. According to the latest data through the end of last year, Shanghai is now home to some 173,000 long-term expat residents, accounting for a full one-quarter of all foreigners living long-term in China. The number was up 6.7 percent from a year earlier, which isn’t exactly a lighting-pace expansion, perhaps due to China’s economic slowdown. The reports don’t include any comparable numbers for Beijing or other cities, and I expect that Beijing probably isn’t too far behind Shanghai in terms of its total number of resident expats.
Shanghai’s rapid rise to become the preferred Chinese residence for foreigners is all the more remarkable because the big majority of foreigners here work in private companies. By comparison, Beijing has huge populations of foreigners who work at the city’s many embassy compounds, and it also has large international student populations due to its many universities.
Most foreigners who live in China will usually rank Shanghai as the most livable city for expats, thanks to its ease of getting around and getting things done, and also due to the widespread availability of many foreign goods. One German I met who recently move to Shanghai from Guangzhou described for me the huge differences between the 2 cities, even though Guangzhou is still one of China’s 5 biggest cities and enjoys strong international connections through its proximity to Hong Kong.
He said one of the most noticeable things in Guangzhou was that he would always run into the same group of foreigners the longer he lived in the city, due to its limited number of foreign-style shops and also the small foreign community in general. By comparison, he said, Shanghai has many more options and the range of foreigners is also quite large, from people with families to young singles just starting out in their careers.
The difference is even more remarkable for a long-time China person like myself, who first came to Shanghai in 1987 and at that time couldn’t wait to return to Beijing where there were already far more amenities for foreigners at that early stage of China’s Reform period. I remember my disappointment on visiting the No. 1 Department Store on East Nanjing Road, which my hosts told me was China’s most advanced shopping venue even though it seemed like a dark, dumpy place to me. Equally disappointing was the shabby Peace Hotel, once considered one of the top hotels in Asia in the pre-1949 era.
Much has changed since my first trip to the city 26 years ago, with many of the changes being driven by a current generation of Shanghai leaders determined to build Shanghai into a regional and eventually global financial center. I’ve frequently detailed in this column the many things that Shanghai does to boost efficiency and comfort for not only resident expats, but more importantly the millions of local residents who call the city home. The city government’s strong ability to find practical solutions to everyday problems, often by partnering with local businesses, means that many issues are addressed before they become too serious and long-term consumer satisfaction is usually the central goal.
Still, the same media reports that boast of Shanghai’s status as China’s most international city are also realistic enough to point out that the ratio of foreigners to locals is still a tiny fraction of that seen in other major international centers like London, New York and Singapore. Part of that is due to China’s strict immigration policies, which the country is trying to ease now to attract more overseas talent.
But Shanghai itself also needs to do more to make the city even more livable by improving not only services and infrastructure, but also more abstract things like including more English-language signs and other amenities that cater to international residents. Shanghai residents are already some of the most open-minded in China about embracing foreign things, and that trend also needs to continue and become more pervasive. I’m confident that will happen under the city’s new top leaders, with the result that the number of long-term resident expats should continue to climb and perhaps even reach the half-million mark in the next decade.
