Population

    Due to the constant inflow of people from other parts of the country, the population in Shanghai keeps growing. When Shanghai was turned into a city, it had a population of less than 100,000. By the end of 1949, the year when shanghai was liberated, the figure rose to 5.2 million. At the end of 2013, the city’s permanent resident number surged to 14.3234 million, 2.8 times of that in 1949. The population of long-term residents reached 24.1515 million, including 14.2514 million permanent residents and 9.9001 million from other parts of the country.

Population Changes

    Shanghai is the first provincial area in China to have reported a negative population growth rate. The city’s population of permanent residents saw a birth rate of 0.739%, a mortality rate of 0.819% and a natural growth rate of -0.08% in 2013.

Life Expectancy

    In 2013, the average life expectancy of local permanent residents stood at 82.47 years----80.19 for males and 84.79 for females, about the level in developed countries.

Age Structure

    The sixth national census revealed that Shanghai is home to a population of 23.0191 million people in 2010. Among the total, 8.6% of the city’s long-term residents, or 1.9856 million, were aged 0 to 14; 81.3%, or 18.7037 million were aged 15 to 64; 10.1%, or 2.3298 million aged 65 and above.

Education Level

    According to the sixth national census, 5.0531 million of the city’s long-term residents received education at college level and above in 2010. There were 4.8261 million long-term residents with high school education, 8.393 million with middle school education and 3.1156 million with primary school education. In 2013,99.9% of school-age children attended the nine-year compulsory education.

Expatriates

    Shanghai has become one of the rendezvous of expatriates in China. According to the sixth national census, the number of expatriates living in Shanghai and registered in the census reached 208300. Among them, foreigners, totaling 143,200 people, account for 68.7%, while the rest 31.3% are Hong Kong , Macau and Taiwan residents, totaling 65,100 people. Altogether 19,300 expats in Shanghai are from Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,910 are from Macau Special Administrative Region and another 44,900 are from Taiwan.

Employment

    Shanghai’s employment and labor forces scale continued to expand. The city created 600,500 new jobs in 2013 and successfully helped 10,800 people start their own businesses. By the end of 2013, the city registered an unemployed population of 263,700 people, with an unemployment rate of 4.2%.

Meanwhile, Shanghai keeps perfecting its professional recruitment system in key areas by implementing both national and city-level schemes to attract elite foreign professionals and overseas Chinese. By the end of 2013, 498 people had been selected via the national-level “Recruitment Program of Global Experts” and 442 people were qualified for the Shanghai-level selection. The city also offered vocational training for 596,700 people in 2013, including 295,200 migrant workers. By the end of the year, high-skilled workers accounted for about 28% of the city’s entire labor forces.