Guangzhou’s demographic trends

The Guangdong provincial government recently published a 2017 to 2030 demographic development plan for the province. The official document revealed detailed information about the expected future trends of demographics in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province.

One of the two megacities in Guangdong province

According to the plan, Guangdong province will have two megacities, namely Guangzhou and Shenzhen, by 2020, both of which have an urban population of above 10 million. Two other cities in Guangdong province, namely Foshan and Dongguan, will have a population of between 5 million and 10 million.

Guangzhou's urban population surpassed 10 million at the end of 2001 and stood at 10.15 million back then. Following Chongqing, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin, Guangzhou became then the fifth Chinese city with an over-10-million population.

According to the sixth national population census, Guangzhou's resident population was 12,701,900 as of Nov 1, 2010.  According to statistics released by the Guangzhou bureau of statistics, the city's population was 14,498,400 at the end of 2017, increasing by 454,900 year-on-year.

Faster population growth in Guangzhou's outskirts

According to the plan, both Guangzhou and Shenzhen will keep controlling the population scale in the central districts and utilize the historic opportunity of China's new type of urbanization to motivate people to move to relatively new districts and suburban areas.

During the past two years, Guangzhou's five peripheral districts, namely Panyu, Nansha, Huadu, Conghua, Zengcheng districts, witnessed a faster population growth than downtown areas such as Yuexiu, Liwan, Tianhe, and Haizhu districts.

Panyu district in particular, overtook Haizhu and Tianhe districts in terms of resident population for the first time in 2016 and became the second most populous district in Guangzhou in 2017.

As the metro Line 13, Line 9, and the southern extension of Line 4 came into service last year, the travel time between central districts and the three peripheral districts of Nansha, Zengcheng, and Huadu has been further reduced. More and more people have decided to live and work in these three districts as a result.

"As world-leading enterprises, such as Foxconn, GE, and Cisco, have settled their businesses in the peripheral region of Guangzhou city and the public service quality there is making steady progress, the city's five peripheral districts will become more attractive choices for people who want to invest, work, or live in Guangzhou," said Hu Gang, a Jinan University professor and chairman of a Guangzhou-based think tank on urban development.

Moreover, Guangzhou has just made favorable policies this January for people seeking household registration permits in Guangzhou's peripheral, rather than central, districts, which will further incentivize the more equal redistribution of people across the city of Guangzhou.