Of Two Types of Cities

Smaller cities are surpassing megacities in attraction due to their more livable environments and preferential policies By Yuan Yuan

Xu Feng (not his real name) remembers his hesitation in choosing between two job offers for project manager positions in leading technology companies Xiaomi Corp. and Alibaba Group.

The decision was a difficult one to make mainly due to the locations—Xiaomi is in Beijing, and Alibaba in Hangzhou, capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, some five hours south of the capital by bullet train.

Xu, who graduated from Beijing’s Peking University with a master’s degree, had lived in Beijing for seven years. Before his job hunting began, moving to another city for work had not been in his thoughts.

“More than half of my friends suggested Hangzhou,” Xu told Beijing Review. Some Peking University graduates who were considering relocating or had already relocated to Hangzhou formed a group on WeChat.

“After talking to them, particularly those who went to Hangzhou in previous years, I Figures from Peking University and Tsinghua University, China’s two most prestigious universities, show that more than half of their graduates this year chose to leave Beijing, and the numbers leaving Beijing have steadily increased in recent years.

The difficulty of obtaining a permanent local residence permit, or hukou, in Beijing, and the city’s skyrocketing housing prices and pollution are the top three reasons graduates give for choosing to base themselves elsewhere.

Xu’s job offer in Beijing from Xiaomi didn’t include assistance with securing a hukou, which is critically important to living in megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai. People without a permanent local residence permit face restrictions which include having to pay local social insurance for five consecutive years before they can purchase residential property.

They also face greater difficulty in finding public schools for their children. Since 2015, Beijing has been reducing the number of hukous issued to graduates in a bid to control the size of its population, which has exacerbated the situation. But in