BEIJING: China’s population movement decreased in 2015 for the first time in at least five years, data showed on Tuesday, apparently as fewer people moved between its teeming cities. The movement of hundreds of millions of people from the countryside to towns and cities in recent decades has been both a prime driver and a result of China’s economic boom. But the country’s ‘floating population’ — those who live in a different area to the one where they are registered, including city-to-city movers — fell by 5.68 million to 247 million, figures from the National Bureau of Statistics showed. It was the first recorded decrease since 2000, when China first began issuing the statistic.