Although many locals welcome the presence of foreigners working in the city, they disapproved of the payment gap, a survey said.

The survey, conducted by Shanghai Searchina Information Consulting Co Ltd, asked 3,511 people aged between 18 and 39 about their attitude toward foreigners working in Shanghai.

Most families surveyed have an annual income of less than 40,000 yuan (US$4,819) and the average annual income was fixed at 36,000 yuan per family.

About 51 percent of people surveyed said it was nice to have a growing number of foreigners work in the city while 28 percent held mixed views on the issue.

"The increasing number of foreigners coming to develop their career symbolizes that Shanghai is becoming more like an international metropolis," said Sun Xiaojian, an office worker. "It is nice to have people from different places here."

According to the survey, 42 percent of respondents said foreign workers would increase job competition and put locals at a disadvantage.

Shen Lixia, director assistant at Shanghai Job Placement Center, said expatriates do not compete for jobs with locals.

"The influx of foreigners won't pose more competition to local job seekers as they usually come with front-row professional concepts and ideas that native workers lack," Shen said.

But foreigners will compete with overseas Chinese returning for jobs, Shen said.

The survey also indicated that 76 percent of respondents said it was unreasonable for expatriates to be paid higher than their Chinese colleagues who do the same job. Only 12 percent people consider the income gap understandable and another 12 percent were undecided.

Foreign workers are usually paid twice or even three times more than local counterparts, according to Hudson Recruitment, an international headhunting firm.

There are approximately 110,000 expatriates in the city. Collectively they paid about 1.6 billion yuan in personal income tax during the first six months of the year, up 37.9 percent from a year earlier.

(Shanghai Daily July 27, 2004)