War For Talent Heats Up, Cities Cut Residency Requirements

China has no immigration inflows and treats its citizens like precious resources. A few years ago the government was worried about the hukou system stifling urbanization because cities prevented people from moving in. Now that real estate has cooled and demographics have taken a turn for the worse, cities are lowering residency requirements and fighting to attract talented workers.

iFeng: 多个城市降低入户“门槛” 只要你满足这些条件

In the near future, the "talent fight" is heating up. Since last year, many regions across the country have introduced a talent introduction policy. As a Guangdong province with developed coastal areas, many cities including Shenzhen and Dongguan have intensively issued relevant policies to promote the settlement and employment of non-household population.

...Song Ding, deputy director of the China Urban Economics Experts Committee, said that in terms of Shenzhen, it still maintains 30% of the manufacturing industry, and it requires a large number of skilled workers. This does not require particularly high academic qualifications. On the one hand, there is a need for talent wars in terms of academic qualifications. At the same time, it also requires a technically-employed labor-employed population.

Chinese cities are even fighting to attract high-skilled people without academic qualifications because they have a manufacturing base. In the U.S.A., not so much.

In the past, Shenzhen’s talent settlement policy focused on those with high academic qualifications, technical expertise, and high taxpayers. As of the end of 2016, the registered population in Shenzhen accounted for only 34% of the permanent population. Compared to the proportion of 62%, 59%, and 63% of the total population of the city, the population structure of Shenzhen still needs to be optimized. Thanks to the continuous relaxation of the settlement policy in Shenzhen in recent years, in 2017, the registered population of Shenzhen reached 4,498,600 and the annual growth rate was 451,700.

Dong Hao, deputy director of the Social Development Department of the Shenzhen Municipal Development and Reform Commission, said that the modest increase in the population size of registered households and the long-term inversion of household registration and non-hukou population ratios are the requirements for the stability of the population structure.

...Since the beginning of this year, first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have issued relevant high-end talent introduction policies. What is different from these places is that the household registration policies introduced in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and other places have, to a large extent, passed on the robbing of ordinary labor.

However, why did the Pearl River Delta region become the target for the robbing of population and resources?