The time for speculation is over. And the numbers will come as a surprise to many. For there has not been the slump in Nanjing’s foreign populace that was suspected by a good chunk of the local international community. Quite the contrary.
The Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Statistics (南京市统计局) yesterday informed The Nanjinger that the number of foreigners in Nanjing is now “about 19,500”.
The inaccuracy is explained by the numbers of people in quarantine or self isolating at home who have not yet registered with the police, or by lags in the system due to temporary registrations in hotels, complicated by purpose of visit, length of stay etc.
Then there are those sleeping on friends’ sofas, those who have not registered with the police and those who escaped the census.
It’s the most accurate figure we are going to get. For now.
The most important thing is the number is up. According to the last set of data to which The Nanjinger was privy, back in 2018 there were 18,864 foreigners registered in Nanjing.
So the mass exodus that was feared did not in fact take place. Or if it did, many have now returned. And of those who didn’t, they have been replaced and surpassed.
In April 2017, Nanjing implemented reforms to the approval system for foreigners to work in China, merging the two permits that were once required into one “Permit for Foreigners to Work in China”. Also put in place were various incentives for foreign talents looking to come to Nanjing, particularly those in fields the city deems desirable.
As a result, since the implementation of the reforms, Nanjing had introduced 6,307 foreign talents as of April, 2019.
Looking at the bigger picture, more accurate figures are available for each of China’s provinces and other regions. According to the Communiqué of the Seventh National Population Census (No. 8), in our very own Jiangsu, the foreign population stood at 58,201.
The complete breakdown, in descending order of number of foreign residents, is Guangdong (418,509), Yunnan (379,281), Shanghai (163,954), Fujian (106,248), Beijing (62,812), Jiangsu (58,201), Zhejiang (46,189), Guangxi (26,043), Shandong (21,829), Liaoning (20,562) and others (127,067).
“Foreigners” in this sense includes people from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), Macao SAR and Taiwan.
With China having a total of 1,430,695 foreigners in the 2020 census, the number of residents from Honk Kong, Macao and Taiwan respectively accounted for 26, 3.9 and 11 percent of the total.
