Shangai plans to be China’s ‘most international city’

Bivash Mukherjee is in Shanghai for the long haul. The media worker from India has already spent 18 years in the Chinese financial hub and is not about to leave anytime soon.
The safety and job opportunities make it an attractive place to live and work but there are also huge disadvantages – the biggest one being China’s limits on access to the internet.
“Trying to hook on to VPNs for everything is a real pain,” Mukherjee said, referring to virtual private networks that help internet users in China get around blocks on sites including Twitter, Google and Facebook.
At the same time, rising costs are making the city almost as expensive as Hong Kong, forcing Mukherjee to send his children to school in a neighbouring province.
“There are international schools but all of them are massively expensive … I know families who have gone back – though they liked it here very much – because the schools were unaffordable,” he said.

Then there is the lack of health and welfare coverage that makes medical treatment expensive.
“For injuries and major concerns people prefer to fly back home and deal with it,” he said.
Mukherjee is not about to leave and he is sure many other foreigners will be keen to come to work in Shanghai, a city of more than 24 million people. But he also knows many businesspeople who are packing up – for these reasons and others.
And that disaffection could work against the city’s ambitious plans to quadruple its expatriate population to 800,000 in less than two decades as it strives to become a top “international metropolis”.

According to official data, 170,000 foreigners, or less than 1 per cent of Shanghai’s population, lived in the city for at least six months in 2015. To meet its target, Shanghai will have to attract 630,000 more by 2035, the same deadline by which it plans to cap its population at 25 million. If it did get there, the city would have more expatriates than Hong Kong.
But there are a number of factors working against those ambitions.
Morgen Shan, a partner at Experis, an arm of recruitment firm ManpowerGroup, said international companies contributed a big part of the city’s expat population but more of their foreign staff were leaving.