TO obtain a Shanghai permanent residency permit as soon as possible is Sandy Miao’s biggest ambition.

The 27-year-old reporter from China Business News, during a break in last week’s annual session of the Shanghai People’s Congress, mused about what she would do if she were a lawmaker.

“I would want to improve the city’s current household registration system,” she said without hesitation. “Without permanent residency, I feel like an outsider here.”

Shanghai’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), approved by the congress last week, affect lives of Miao and all others dwelling in the city. It sets forth goals for social and economic development for the city, and one goal is to curtail population growth.

Miao hails from the city of Wenzhou in neighboring Zhejiang Province and has worked in Shanghai for five years on a temporary residency permit. Those in that category are denied access to certain benefits and services, such as medical insurance, subsidized housing, basic education for children and care services for the elderly.

China’s household registration system has a long history. Shanghai maintains a stricter system than most other cities because it has been such a magnet for people from across China.

According to official figures, Shanghai was home to 24.3 million people at the end of 2014.

The number included registered locals and migrants who had been in the city for six months or more.

Many people have suggested that the household registration system be scrapped, but that is looking less likely now as the city bursts at the seams with more people than its urban services can handle.

“Shanghai is overloaded,” Party Secretary Han Zheng said during a speech at the congress. “We have too many people, and it has become a serious constraint on development and has become a source of rising dissatisfaction about quality of life.”

Mayor Yang Xiong said population management is a major priority in the next five years.

“Population management, or more accurately population restructuring, is closely connected with the city’s economic restructuring, the realization of our ambition to become a global center of innovation in science and technology, and eventually, the achievement of a better quality of life,” the mayor said.

According to the plan approved last week by lawmakers, Shanghai has set a maximum population limit of 25 million. That leaves little room for waves of newcomers in the next five years and puts permanent residency permits further out of reach for many.

“Shanghai needs to do a tricky balancing act,” said Wu Ruijun, dean of the School of Social Development at East China Normal University. “The city needs to control the number of people coming while continuing to attract the top-flight professionals it needs to fulfill its dreams as a global metropolis of stature.”

The Five-Year Plan reiterates Shanghai’s ambition to remain a pioneer for national reform and market opening and a leader in innovation-driven development.

By 2020, Shanghai aims to have created the basic framework for a city at the vanguard of science and technology, a city with global influence and a city with average annual gross domestic product growth of 6.5 percent or higher.

Funding for research and development will be maintained above 3.5 percent of the economic output, and per-capita disposable income is expected to double from 2010.

Shanghai will give priority to high-end, smart, green and service-providing industries, and move to an economy led by modern finance, commerce, research and design.

“That means Shanghai needs more people with knowledge and innovation,” said Yang Xiong, director of the Institute of Sociology at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and no relation to the mayor. “The relatively young people with advanced skills will be the best survivors in the city.”

On the population issue, official figures show more than 10 million migrants live in the city. Nearly half of them occupy low-wage jobs in construction, the hospitality industry and domestic housework.

“We can’t deny that they have contributed a lot to the city’s development in the past years, and Shanghai is thankful,” Yang said. “But the city is restructuring on all fronts, including population. The adjustment will give preference to professionals over blue-collar migrants.”

He also predicted an increase in the expatriate population. At present, only 1 percent of the population comes from overseas, compared with New York’s 20 percent and the global average of 5 percent.

Shanghai has been demolishing illegal structures where migrants often live and cracking down on groups renting one apartment.

Population management also covers policies to cope with an aging society. By 2020, one in three Shanghai residents will be 60 years or older.

At the same time, the city remains committed to reducing pollution, improving the environment, encouraging growth through consumption and providing better services in education, healthcare, pensions and social protections.

For example, the new Five-Year Plan sets a target of decreasing the density of PM2.5 particles — a major contributor to air pollution ­— to 42 micrograms per cubic meter by 2020, down from 53 last year. It also promises strengthened efforts to tackle water and soil pollution.

“Shanghai is the place I really want to make home,” Miao said, before we returned to the meeting to cover a debate on policies. “I won’t stop trying to get permanent residency.”

WELL, we did pretty well the last time around!

IF the past is anything to go by, Shanghai’s new Five-Year Plan (2016-20) should produce some positive results.

In an autopsy of the city’s recently ended 12th Five-Year Plan, Mayor Yang Xiong said all objectives were met.

A work report delivered by the mayor showed that average annual growth during the 2011-15 period was 7.5 percent, capped by economic output of 2.5 trillion yuan (US$379 billion) last year.

In 2015, Shanghai created 597,000 new jobs and kept the urban registered unemployment rate at 4.1 percent. Per-capita disposable income of urban residents rose 8.4 percent, and the consumer prices gained 2.4 percent, well within inflation targets.

Progress was made in developing the city’s services sector, which contributed about 68 percent to the economy, up 10.5 percentage points in the last five years. General public budget revenue expanded 1.9 times in the period to 551.9 billion yuan.

Yang said the city reduced emissions of major pollutants ahead of goals, and more than 1,200 installations that were energy intensive, highly polluting, dangerous or inefficient were phased out last year.

One of the crowning achievements of the last Five-Year Plan was the creation and expansion of the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone, set up to test market-opening reforms and help the city develop into a center for innovation in science and technology.

The nation’s C919 large passenger aircraft rolled off the assembly line, and the National Robot Testing and Evaluation Center was established in Shanghai.

Urban infrastructure improvements also accelerated. The city’s Metro system added 165 kilometers in the last five years to reach 588 kilometers of operational lines. Construction of the Middle Ring Road was completed, and the city basically achieved full coverage of its 4G telecommunications network.

Shanghai also provided more welfare benefits to people, with 200,000 citizens receiving more help. The basic pension of urban retirees grew by more than 10 percent, and 126,000 beds were added to elderly care homes. The number of medical institutions run by care providers reached 189.

Some 3.2 million square meters of dilapidated housing in central districts were razed in the five years, Yang said. The city also delivered 878,000 units of subsidized housing to put roofs over the heads of the low-income.

To improve public health and safety, Shanghai developed a comprehensive food safety monitoring system. It also finished the evaluation of 1,633 old elevators in resident communities last year.

To avoid tragedies like the Bund stampede on the 2015 New Year’s Eve, the city formulated the Shanghai Safety Measures on Crowd Management in Public Spaces, and improved emergency contingency plans for crowd control on urban rail transit systems.

Drawing lesson from the Tianjin’s chemical plant explosion last year, Shanghai also revised rules on hazardous chemical plants outside industrial parks and hazardous chemical warehouses in port areas. It established a system to supervise and monitor the transport of hazardous substances.

Firefighting equipment for 100 residential communities was upgraded last year and installed in 500 high-rise buildings.

URBAN policy planning is a long, laborious process

SHANGHAI’S 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) is the culmination of 17 months of study, expert advice, grassroots input, public surveys and legislative debate.

The plan, which charts a course for the city’s economic and social development, underwent draft after draft, according to those involved in its compilation.

The process began in August, 2014, with the appointment of a commission led by Mayor Yang Xiong. Subcommittees did preliminary work in 67 different areas in 17 districts and counties, which led to a working draft plan.

After that came the painstaking work of refining the proposals and collecting feedback and suggestions. Some 9,400 people were polled by opinion surveys. The commission also received more than 1,100 recommendations from members of the Shanghai People’s Congress and more than 1,700 suggestions from grassroots citizens and groups.

Planners also looked at the key elements in the central government’s Five-Year Plan.

A think tank comprised of 25 experts from Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai also offered advice, as did the mayor’s International Business Leaders Advisory Council at its annual meeting. In addition, plan drafters studied urban development plans for New York, London and Tokyo to see how those jurisdictions tackled concerns of public interest.

The wealth of input resulted in more than 200 revisions to the plan.

In some cases, special investigations were initiated to delve into particular problem areas and come up with solutions

On December 24, the Standing Committee of the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Party of China passed the final draft of the plan, which came into effect on January 1.