Population Is a Problem | After Taking In More Than 500,000 People in Half a Year, What Has Changed in Xi'an?

Housing prices, the cost of living, traffic, education — wherever you look, discontent is building. Yet the same changes have left some people more confident than ever about Xi'an's future.

Xi'an's drive to bring in talent shows no sign of slowing.

On May 14, Wang Shufen, a PhD holder originally from Hubei, became the 400,000th new resident of Xi'an. On July 24, graduate student Chang Haitao, professor Dang Xinxian and physician Sun Yang all became the 550,000th newly registered resident at once. On August 1, internist Wei Linting became the 1,000th PhD holder Xi'an had recruited.

Xi'an's local newspapers and websites are still running story after story about household registration — or, more accurately, promotional copy. This city, capital to at least ten dynasties and home to more than 6,000 years of archaeological history, hasn't been this busy in a long time.

Xi'an's registration policy first drew attention this past April. The city government announced that in the 105 days between January 1 and April 16, 300,000 people had newly registered as residents. Set against the city's registered population of 8.45 million at the end of 2017, that is a startling number. Before this, Xi'an's registered population had barely moved: 8.06 million, 8.15 million and 8.16 million in 2013, 2014 and 2015.

Taking in registration applications on a mass scale, as a way of attracting talent, began in January 2017. Under the policy, anyone under 35 with at least a secondary vocational education could register. Self-employed people who paid more than 20,000 yuan in taxes a year, and homebuyers, also qualified. This was the main reason Xi'an's registered population jumped by more than 200,000 that year.

In early 2018, Xi'an loosened the requirements again, letting immediate family members move with the applicant, and set up a dedicated "Command Center for Winning the Battle for Talent and Population." Registration growth sped up once more, which is what produced the wall-to-wall coverage of Xi'an in April.

For a while, Xi'an became a punchline online. At the train station, a police officer stops a traveler: "Are you from Xi'an?" "No." "What's your education level? What year did you graduate?" "Bachelor's degree, graduated this year." "Come with us to the station — we'll register you based on your degree, and reimburse your train ticket."

People in Xi'an doubt these jokes are true. Wang Yuan (a pseudonym), 28, says she has never seen anything of the sort happen. But she brings the joke up herself, meaning that from what she reads online and in the news, she too can feel the city government going "crazy" trying to bring in talent.

If this pace holds through the end of 2018, the number of people newly registered in Xi'an this year could reach 1 million — growth of more than 10% — pushing the registered population past 10 million. No other city has won such swift, massive gains in this year's race to grab people.

In world history, even the United States, where natural population growth peaked after World War II and produced the Baby Boom generation, averaged only 2% to 3% growth a year in those years. And if you look at growth driven by migration between cities, New York averaged only 8.5% a year in its fastest-growing decade of the 1900s.

It was that concentrated wave of coverage in April that made many Xi'an residents realize how much their city was changing, and it stirred up all kinds of reactions. Some understand that Xi'an needs more people to grow quickly; others worry about what a sudden population surge does to the look of the city, to prices, to housing costs, and to every other part of running a city.

Where each person sits in this society decides whether they feel optimistic or pessimistic about what is happening to Xi'an. And that tangle of feelings, which no single word can capture, may itself be the question the city has to think about: after all this change, what kind of city will Xi'an become?

Xi'an residents generally feel that before 2016, nothing much had happened to the city for a long time.

As Wang Yuan remembers it, Xi'an's housing prices barely moved for about a decade. Ten years ago, the State Council rolled out a 4-trillion-yuan stimulus package, pumping money into every industry and setting off a wave of rising home prices. According to the Xi'an Bureau of Statistics, the average home price in Xi'an rose from 4,710 yuan the year before to 5,992 yuan in 2010, then crept up slowly all the way through 2015.

Wang Yuan puts this down to one fact: people in Xi'an do not lack housing. Plenty of other residents say the same. Because the planned economy handed Xi'an the jobs of military industry, heavy industry and research, the city is still dominated today by state-owned enterprises, public institutions and government agencies. Those employers still hand out welfare housing to their staff. "Lots of families have two apartments — one from Dad's work unit, one from Mom's."

With demand never that strong, and the resident population steady at around 8.5 million for years, many people in Xi'an felt home prices sat at 7,000 to 8,000 yuan year after year. That held until after Chinese New Year in 2017.

Wang Yuan is a programmer who now works for a tech company in Xi'an. In 2015 she finished a master's degree at a Project 211 university in Beijing and began weighing her options. She had offers from several Beijing tech companies, but none of them could solve her household-registration problem, so she chose to go back to Xi'an.

Beijing's sky-high home prices had left a mark on her, and she suspected Xi'an's prices would rise eventually too. Once her life in Xi'an settled down, she started planning to buy an apartment. In mid-2016 she toured a handful of developments, but buying a home is a big decision, so she took her time.

A year later, when she went to look again, everything had changed. Salespeople used to walk buyers around the actual finished units, and most sales were of completed properties. By 2017 finished units had grown scarce, and all she could do was stare at the scale model in the sales office and imagine her future home. The sales staff grew more impatient by the day.

"After Chinese New Year in 2017, prices basically rose by 1,000 yuan a month." Facing ever-higher prices, Wang Yuan bought an apartment in August 2017 at 12,000 yuan per square meter, for delivery in 2019. Today the market price at that development has climbed again, to around 14,000 yuan.

She is glad she acted when she did, but compared with 2016 prices she still feels she lost out. She will spend the next few decades slowly paying off the extra 300,000 to 400,000 yuan the apartment ended up costing her.

By her account, Xi'an home prices went through two waves of rapid increase, right after Chinese New Year in 2017 and again in 2018. Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics bear this out. In the first half of 2016, the year-over-year rise in Xi'an's new-home price index ran between 0.2% and 3%. By March 2017 it had topped 10%, and by July it passed 15%.

Resale prices also shot up once the stock of finished units was worked through. A report in Huashang Daily, citing relevant data, said that "as of July 23, 2018, the average resale-home price in Xi'an was 12,244 yuan, up 57.10% year over year." Those two waves lined up almost exactly with the two times the city loosened its registration rules.

By 2018, buying a home had suddenly become a headache in Xi'an. Paying in full had all but become a basic requirement. In March the city also introduced a lottery for home purchases, meaning that even with money in hand you needed luck to buy an apartment. In May, a Sunac development in Xi'an was found to have promised its supposedly lottery-allocated units to government officials in advance. City authorities released their findings a month later and disciplined 35 public officials.

Liu Yu had just gotten pregnant and was in a hurry to buy a home with her husband — she counts herself among the buyers with a genuine need — but after months of looking she still had nothing. The situation has worn her down. "I just feel like the lottery is never going to land on me. Prices have gone up too fast, and it's too expensive!"

Housing prices are only one part of what Xi'an has gone through in the past two years. Almost every corner of daily life here feels different from before.

Nearly everyone brings up prices. A roujiamo used to cost six or seven yuan; now it's ten. Commutes have gotten more congested. In April, Xi'an introduced a license-plate driving restriction in the name of the environment, but getting to and from work still takes longer than it used to.

Huang Mu, 20, lives in Chang'an District in southern Xi'an, on the edge of the urban core. She has noticed: "A few years ago I could go out at night in flip-flops and it was fine — everyone did that. Now at night there are a lot of people out dressed up nicely." She can't say whether that's because more people have registered here, or because Xi'an has become a popular tourist city.

Tourism, like household registration, brings more people into the city. The difference is that registration brings relatively long-term, stable residents, while tourism brings people who come to spend money for a short time. Xi'an has chased tourism with the same enthusiasm it has brought to recruiting residents.

Wang Xuekun runs a craft-beer bar at the foot of Xi'an's city wall. A Douyin employee once turned up with an official document in hand, hoping to work with him. Wang thought it sounded like a fine opportunity, but once he explained that he ran a bar, the Douyin employee dropped the idea. Wang guesses alcohol made them wary.

The man driving the full partnership between Douyin and Xi'an is municipal Party secretary Wang Yongkang. In April the Xi'an Tourism Development Commission signed an agreement with Douyin. The two sides agreed to use Douyin's full suite of products to package and promote Xi'an's culture and tourism industry. "Douyin provides the platform and the influencers; the Tourism Development Commission plans distinctive filming routes and covers local hosting costs; Douyin then carries out the specific filming plans."

A Southern Weekly report, citing staff at Douyin and at Xi'an government departments, said, "Municipal Party leadership takes this very seriously." In May, Wang Yongkang led thirty or forty local officials on a visit to Douyin's parent company, Toutiao.

Wang Yongkang, who had spent years working in Zhejiang, was parachuted into Xi'an in December 2016. In the eyes of Xi'an residents he is a divisive figure. Wang Yuan feels the city sped up after he arrived. "Xi'an used to barely change, and now there's basically a new plan announced every week." But she added that plenty of people dislike him. She opened a WeChat group, scrolled for a moment, and immediately found members complaining about him.

People are arriving, but Xi'an's public resources cannot expand in the short term, which is bound to create problems inside the city.

A Huashang Daily investigation into elementary-school enrollment showed that in 2017, 21,060 children in Xi'an's Yanta District moved up from kindergarten into first grade. The Yanta education bureau had expected the new registration policy to push 2018 enrollment to around 22,000; by the time the bureau ran a survey in mid-May, demand had already reached 24,000. The same thing was happening in Baqiao and Weiyang districts.

Huashang Daily quoted an education-department employee saying, "We've been searching constantly for any empty space that could serve as a classroom, to take in as many students from the school district as we can." "As we understand it, this year Jingkai, Weiyang and Yanta have the most students, and places are tight in Chang'an District too." But the report noted that children of new Xi'an residents were having trouble enrolling or transferring schools.

Past experience suggests this is not easy to fix. A Workers' Daily report from September 2016 said the Xi'an Education Bureau had issued a policy under which, judged by household registration, residence permits, employment certificates and outflow certificates, school-age children entering elementary or middle school could no longer use the old policy of free enrollment near their parents' place of work, and had to return to their place of household registration for school.

In early 2018, Xi'an issued a policy for newly registered residents: "Anyone who registered in Xi'an after March 23 must take the high-school entrance exam at their original place of household registration; anyone who registered after November 21, 2017, must return to their original place of registration to sit the 2018 college entrance exam."

Over the past few years the number of Shaanxi students sitting the gaokao has fallen from 355,000 to 310,000, while in neighboring Henan it has risen from 724,000 to 826,000 — and Shaanxi's 14% admission rate to top-tier universities is nearly double Henan's. A WeChat official account called "Xi'an Gaokao Guidance" published a piece worrying about gaokao migration: "Amid today's frenzied storm of registering people in Xi'an, three years from now many an old Shaanxi native may be shocked to find out just who has been breaking off a piece of their own child's bread — and this is no scaremongering!"

For many people, this has broken what they expected of the city. Yuan Qi is a Xi'an native who works in Shanghai. She had planned to keep Xi'an as her fallback. After following the news about the changes at home, she said: "I think I finally understand that exclusionary streak Beijing and Shanghai people have toward outsiders. I used to think I could make money in Shanghai and buy a place in Xi'an. I don't think that anymore."

But not everyone thinks the changes in Xi'an are bad.

Despite the "loss" she took on her apartment, Wang Yuan still feels the changes are what she wanted to see — at the very least there are more places to have fun now. Wang Xuekun is a direct beneficiary: as tourist numbers have grown, the city has gained energy, and his craft-beer bar finally broke even this year. Before that, he had to keep answering puzzled customers who wandered in by mistake: "It's just a beer — why does it cost thirty or forty yuan?"

Most people in Xi'an feel the city grew slowly for years before 2017. That feeling comes largely from comparison with other second-tier cities. In 2006 Chengdu's GDP was about 391 billion yuan, twice Xi'an's. By 2016 Chengdu's had grown to 1.2 trillion yuan — still roughly twice Xi'an's 620 billion — but the absolute gap had widened, which made the difference feel far starker. As Chengdu became the southwest's central city, courted by luxury brands, Xi'an started to look like it was falling behind.

Xi'an's GDP ranking among major Chinese cities did rise from around 40th to 26th between 2006 and 2016, but mostly because a batch of old industrial cities — Shenyang, Shijiazhuang, Daqing — declined. Among provincial capitals, Xi'an's absolute gap with Chengdu, Wuhan, Changsha and Zhengzhou kept widening. By 2016, Hefei, whose GDP had been half of Xi'an's twenty years earlier, had gradually caught up and now sits at roughly the same size.

Wang Xuekun sees bringing in more talent as a way to jolt Xi'an into growing. More people means more competition, he believes, and only competition can speed a city up. That, he thinks, is the only way Xi'an can avoid the decline now facing his own hometown, Fengzhou, a town in Baoji, Shaanxi.

Baoji was once an important transport hub in China. The Baoji–Chengdu railway, fully opened in 1958, tied Baoji to Chengdu and served as the key link between northwest and southwest China — part of the "five vertical, three horizontal" rail network, and a fixture in middle-school geography textbooks. Fengzhou was an important stop on that line: to get over the Qinling Mountains, trains needed an extra locomotive attached at Fengzhou, so everyone passing through had to stop there, and the town got its chance to grow.

But as the rail network expanded, highways and flights opened between Xi'an and Chengdu, and the Xi'an–Chengdu high-speed line started running at the end of 2017. Baoji, and Fengzhou in particular, mattered less and less as a hub. "Hardly anyone rides the Baoji–Chengdu line now, and they've shrunk that station down to almost nothing," Wang Xuekun said. Fengzhou locals have been moving away, and losing people has made growth harder still. "Prices there are about the same as in Xi'an, but people earn a lot less."

Wang Xuekun went back to visit not long ago. He described it this way: "Fengzhou is a mountain area, and the farmers there can't really earn much. Especially after the Grain for Green program turned farmland back into forest, they don't have enough cropland, and it's hard for them to grow anything. The town is really run-down — there's nothing there, and by seven or eight in the evening there's no one on the street."

What Fengzhou is going through is what Shaanxi as a whole faces. Apart from Xi'an, Yulin and Yan'an, the province's other seven cities all showed signs of losing young people between 2010 and 2016. In Tongchuan, elementary-school enrollment fell sharply, from 51,000 students in 2010 to 36,000 in 2016.

In June 2017, the Shaanxi Provincial Bureau of Statistics released the Shaanxi Population Development Report 2017: "The number of women of childbearing age is falling year by year, the average age of first marriage and first birth keeps rising, and women's willingness to have children has dropped — the momentum for future births is weak."

Xi'an has yet to show clear signs of losing people, but a few subtle indicators have appeared. From 2013 to 2015 births in Xi'an held steady at around 85,000 a year. Over the same period, elementary-school enrollment rose from 510,000 to 570,000, while middle-school enrollment fell from 430,000 to 410,000. As is true nationwide, these numbers mean Xi'an will face serious aging problems in the long run.

Since those problems are coming anyway, bringing in people now may, over the long run, turn out to be good for Xi'an.

Xi'an is after far more room to grow, not just holding steady.

This past February the National Development and Reform Commission released the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration Development Plan, naming Xi'an China's ninth central city. By the commission's definition, a central city must carry national strategic functions in the economy, politics, society, culture, international exchange and regional influence; hold nationwide clout; be able to represent the country in international cooperation and competition; and sit at the core of a major national economic region and urban cluster. The central cities named before Xi'an were Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan and Zhengzhou.

In early 2017, Wang Yongkang proposed that within five years Xi'an's GDP should pass 1 trillion yuan (in 2017 it was under 720 billion). A Southern Weekly report said Wang Yongkang's benchmark has always been Chengdu: "In speeches at meetings big and small, he keeps bringing up 'catching up with Chengdu.'"

Population is an indispensable piece of that plan. Speaking at a meeting, Wang Yongkang said the first of Xi'an's three steps was building the Greater Xi'an metropolitan area: "By 2020, Xi'an's registered population will exceed 10 million, and the resident population under management will reach 15 million." According to Xi'an's statistical bulletin, the resident population at the end of 2017 was about 9.53 million, including the Xixian New Area, folded into Xi'an's figures that year. Wang Yongkang's target, in other words, is to grow the city's population capacity to 1.5 times its current level within three years.

That is an extremely ambitious and extremely aggressive target, and it will test what the city can bear. But before any of that, Xi'an has something else to reckon with: as a city packed with universities, it should not be short of talent in the first place. The real question seems to be how Xi'an can keep the talent it already has.

Of the nearly 7,000 students who graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2017, only 36.84% took jobs in Shaanxi. Figures from the 2016 Report on the Employment of Shaanxi College Graduates say that of 356,000 graduates, 192,000 — 54% — found work inside the province. That sounds decent, but 168,000 of them were from Shaanxi to begin with, which means very few graduates from other provinces are willing to stay. At a top school like Xi'an Jiaotong University, fewer still.

One big problem for Xi'an is its narrow industrial base: science and engineering students find work easily here, while graduates in other fields struggle to find anything suitable. Huang Mu studies journalism at a Project 985 university and hopes to work in creative design. She complains that Xi'an has almost no such jobs: "Just look at Daxiang Advertising, which holds the ad contract for the Xi'an subway — their billboards haven't been changed in years."

Yuan Qi once moved back to Xi'an because the work pressure in Shanghai was too much. But working in marketing, she found jobs in that field in Xi'an nowhere near professional — she had to teach people the entire workflow from scratch. She couldn't fit into the local work culture, and she wasn't willing to coast in Xi'an, so after three months she went back to Shanghai.

In public reporting on Xi'an's registration drive, most of the people involved are from Shaanxi to begin with, and many of those who registered had already gone to college in Xi'an and found jobs there afterward. For them, registering is a way to live better in the city they are already in, not evidence that the city pulls in talent.

With support from relevant authorities, Huashang Daily surveyed 200 newly registered Xi'an residents. Nearly 60% were already working in Xi'an before they registered. In a separate survey of 50 people in one of Xi'an's core districts, 57% had been working in Xi'an before registering, while 43% had not found work in Xi'an after registering.

In that sense, Xi'an's registration policy should mostly be read as correcting an old unfairness — letting the "second-class citizens" who worked in Xi'an without local registration finally get equal treatment.

Even if Xi'an misses its target of 15 million residents by 2020, and even if the whole talent push turns out to be prosperity on paper, the pressure the policy has already put on the city is plain. Wang Xuekun says friends from out of town have been calling to ask whether there's a chance to invest in Xi'an property.

From housing prices and school places down to the price of a roujiamo and the traffic, the effects have seeped into everything. Even the most optimistic people feel it. A Xi'an electronics salesman said that if he were pushed out by new arrivals simply because he wasn't competitive enough, he could accept that — but the process still frightens him.

This is not only a test of how well the city can be run; it will also decide whether Xi'an can keep attracting talent. A Huashang Daily report from May, after listing some young people's reasons for registering in Xi'an, also cited the case of a 24-year-old surnamed Peng. "[Mr. Peng] deeply regrets registering in Xi'an. Local companies here have left him with his worst impression yet, and he gets furious every time it comes up. And even after registering, he still can't buy a home."

If Chinese people go on moving between cities as freely as they can today, then the talent Xi'an is drawing in now is only passing through. Only if the city can offer a decent picture of the future might these people push it into a virtuous cycle. If Xi'an can't guarantee basic living conditions, they are very likely to head instead for cities with better prospects — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu.

"Xi'an used to have a fairly balanced relationship between spending and wages. But once housing and other prices go up, and the city can't actually hold on to all these extra people, the locals may be the only ones left carrying that inflated cost," Huang Mu said, describing a worry her parents share. It is much like China's development over the past decade: asset prices inflated, inflation rose with them, but the real economy never expanded by anything close to the same amount.

Worry about the wider economy is the other side of the problem. Whether Xi'an will actually benefit from its new residents is far from clear — among the many things that drive a city's growth, population is only one.

The electronics salesman said business in his line has been hard this year. Among the shops he happens to have noticed, several similar stores have already closed. Wang Xuekun, while optimistic about Xi'an's development on the strength of the talent it is bringing in, seems broadly pessimistic about the wider economy.

What kind of city Xi'an will finally become is still hard to say. Solving the housing, education, congestion and price problems it faces now is only the first step. And the voices of discontent have already started to gather.

"I hope Xi'an stops modernizing. Wouldn't it be nice to stay a city with an old, timeworn charm?" Yuan Qi said.

At the interviewees' request, Wang Yuan, Liu Yu, Huang Mu and Yuan Qi are pseudonyms.

Cover image from Pixabay, Flickr and Wikipedia; in-text photos taken locally by the author.