More and more Shanghai residents are looking for love outside of
the city, if marriage statistics released by the Shanghai Civil
Affairs Bureau are any guide.
Some 38.4 percent of the marriages registered so far this year
included one newlywed with residency outside of Shanghai, up from
35.8 percent of last year.
"The figure would be much higher if we counted people from other
provinces who have obtained Shanghai residency," said Xu Anqi, a
sociologist at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
She attributed the change to the gradually weakening role that
local residency permits play in people's social lives and a recent
influx of immigrants into the city.
"Twenty years ago, people depended on their residency permits
for almost everything, from getting a job to buying a house," she
said. "And now they are not that important any more."
Government reforms that have taken place since the 1980s have
allowed people to compete according to their abilities, regardless
of where they are from. And in recent years Shanghai has made an
effort to grab a bigger share of the country's talent with
preferential policies designed to attract people to the city.
It appears to be working. The most recent survey found that
while 14 million people hold Shanghai residency permits, the city
is also home to 5 million immigrants.
"Immigrants represent a large portion of the city's population,
a situation that is reflected in the marriage statistics," Xu
said.
Although couples of native-Shanghai men and immigrant women
account for most of the cross-region marriages in the city, more
Shanghai girls are also marrying men from other provinces.
Xu said that in the past, Shanghai men tended to search for
wives from other provinces only after failing to find a
native-Shanghai wife. Few Shanghai women were willing to date men
from other provinces.
But the situation has changed. In 2004, Shanghai registered
39,700 cross-region marriages, and 8,000 of those involved a
husband from outside of Shanghai. This was double the figure from
2002.
"While the old generation still thinks Shanghai residency is
important, young women are thinking more about personality and
capability," said Xu Anqi.
Yan Min, a 29-year-old Shanghai woman who married a man from Henan Province last year, said men from other
provinces had to work hard to survive in such a competitive city,
and therefore would have a more promising future. Yan's husband is
an IT engineer working for an American company.
(China Daily November 29, 2006)