Four years after Shanghai’s harsh citywide lockdown, there are signs the city’s expatriate population – which thinned significantly during the pandemic – is starting to rebound, though with a notably different demographic profile.
The sound of English, Korean and French is once again often heard drifting through the plane-tree-lined streets of Shanghai’s former French Concession – widely seen as the heart of the city’s international community. And local residents point to a gradual, though uneven, recovery.
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The French and German consulates in Shanghai have reported over the past six months that the local expat populations from their countries were “stable or increasing again”, said Denis Depoux, a global managing director at consultancy Roland Berger, who has lived in the city for 11 years.
The European expat population – boosted by a recovery in international student numbers – may even have bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, according to Depoux. But the same cannot be said for the United States or Japan, which saw a much larger exodus of expats during the pandemic and have struggled to recover, he added.
While local authorities have yet to release updated figures on the city’s foreign population, there is a sense that China may have benefited from a recent wave of positive attention related to its technological progress and its willingness to stand up to US President Donald Trump’s global trade war.
Still, a report by recruitment agency DirectHR last year suggests there is a long way to go. The firm found that Shanghai’s foreign population had risen from a low of 84,237 in 2023 to reach nearly 92,000 in 2024 – though that remains far short of 2015’s peak of about 178,000.
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The expat community in Shanghai has turned over – it’s a new crowd now