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)