China's one-child policy and the hard work by Shanghai family-planning clinics have, over time, led to a drop in the city's population of about seven million.

Officials from the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission came up with the figure at a work conference yesterday. When you consider that seven million is roughly the population of Hong Kong, it puts the achievement into perspective.

"We got the figure by comparing the birth rate in the late 1950s," said Wu Xiangyong, a commission official. "The family-planning policy effectively helped the city to control its population growth."

The birth rate in 1957 was 4.6 percent and the natural growth rate was 3.99 percent. Shanghai's natural growth rate began to drop after that and has been on a negative curve since 1991.

There were 18.58 million residents in the city in 2007, including people with residency permits and those staying in the city for more than six months. There was a floating population of about 6.6 million in Shanghai last year.

The population density was 2,931 people per square kilometer, making Shanghai the most crowded city in China.

The natural growth rate was minus 0.01 percent for people with local residency. One woman delivered 0.95 children on average last year.

Shanghai is facing tough challenges on population management, since it has a large number of migrant workers, an unbalanced age structure and an increasing amount of elderly, who account for a fifth of local residents, the commission officials said.

This year the city plans to:

Research strategic policy on population administration;

Enhance the management overseeing the migrant population and its birth rate;

Work out population policy in line with the requirements on a modern city;

Perfect the data system on population statistics.

"The city will promote pre-marital checkups and perfect pregnancy examinations and pre-pregnancy checkups to improve quality of newborn babies this year," said Xie Lingli, the commission director.

"Early education on children aged between zero and three and social behavior cultivation on children from one-child families will also be promoted this year," Xie said.

(Shanghai Daily March 18, 2008)