Shanghai bets on better educated workforce to ease ageing woes in China’s premier commercial hub

Shanghai’s municipal authorities are counting on better education, an upgraded industrial mix as well as imported talent to sustain the competitiveness of China’s commercial and financial hub, even as a greying population potentially leaves the megapolis with a labour shortage.

A highly educated population would cushion a decline in the labour force, said the city’s statistics bureau director Zhu Min, as he rolled out the red carpet to professionals around the world to settle down in the city.

“Better jobs will be offered in Shanghai,” Zhu said during a press conference about Shanghai‘s latest population census. “As Shanghai accelerates the transition of its economy and upgrades the industrial mix, talent in various fields will be granted more opportunities to display their high-calibre skills [and qualifications] here.”

Shanghai trails only Liaoning province in north-eastern China’s rust belt as the region with the oldest population, with 14.3 per cent of the municipality’s population of 24.87 million aged over 65 years. In Liaoning, 14.35 per cent of the population are older than 65 years, according to the nation’s census data conducted at the end of 2020, released last week.

The once-a-decade tabulation of the world’s largest population confirmed most of the worries that had been mounting over the years about the shrinking size of China’s working population, as well as surging number of pensioners and retirees, who add to the drain on financial resources to support their health care and retirement.

China’s population grew to 1.412 billion at the end of 2020, expanding at the slowest pace in decades. The number of births fell to a six-decade low of 12 million, while the fertility rate – the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime – dropped to 1.3, well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to ensure a stable population.