Four of China’s top-tier cities have been witnessing diminished populations in their core districts over the past 10 years, a trend that is said to boil down to expensive housing, higher living costs and traffic jams.

Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing, all municipalities directly under the watch of the central government, are losing residents, as reflected in a comparison between the latest census and the one conducted in 2010, according to a local media report.

The phenomenon was particularly appreciable in the Dongcheng and Xicheng districts of the Chinese capital Beijing, as their combined population contracted 16.05% over 10 years, 21st Century Business Herald reported.

The two districts together had almost 1.82 million people in 2020, the report said, citing data from the seventh national census, whereas the sixth census had found a total of 2.16 million residents.

Dongcheng saw a more severe drop, from 919,000 people in 2010 to 709,000 ten years later, which translated into a decrease of 22.9%. It made Dongcheng the fastest-shrinking district across the four municipalities.

Populations in the six major districts of Beijing, namely Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Fengtai, Shijingshan and Haidan, accounted for 50.2% of the population in the national capital city in 2020, a drop of 9.5 percentage points from a decade ago.

Heilongjiang, the northernmost of the 31 provinces, recorded negative growth of 16.87% in the number of permanent inhabitants, the report said.

In the financial hub of Shanghai, the core districts Huangpu, Xuhui, Changning, Jing’an, Putuo, Hongkou and Yangpu dropped 3.4 percentage points in their combined proportion of the municipality’s population. Meanwhile, suburban areas recorded a 2.5 percentage point increase.

Tianjin and Chongqing experienced similar shrinking patterns in their core districts while registering population growth in the suburbs. Xiqing district in the southwest of Tianjin had 74.55% more residents in 2020, totaling nearly 1.2 million people.

Tongzhou district in southeastern Beijing was another attractive place, recording a 55.43% increase to 1.84 million inhabitants over 10 years.

Populations in the core districts of big cities had a tendency to decrease after hitting the peak, said Sun Bushu, vice president of the South China Cities Research Center.

Sun said that people tended to move to the suburbs because the city centers had expensive housing, high living costs and congested roads.

Spreading out the population was good for the development of the suburbs, where residential prices were expected to see steady growth, said Zhang Dawei, chief analyst with Centaline Property Agency.

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