Xinhua Insight: Calls growing for reform of China's divisive household registration system

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Xinhua Insight: Calls growing for reform of China's divisive household registration system

08:52, March 05, 2010      

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Before coming to Beijing, Li Ren had been moving around China's coastal cities of Dongguan and Xiamen for six years, looking to settle down as an urban resident.

"It's almost an impossible goal," said Li, a 23-year-old migrant worker from Nanyang, central China's Henan Province, scanning job information on the billboards outside a job fair at Hufangqiao in downtown Beijing.

"My chance to become an urban resident has been ruined due to my rural hukou (permanent residence permit)," Li said. "We are just excluded from the urban resident's class."

First issued during the famine of 1958, China's household registration papers, or "hukou" in Chinese, classed the country's population into "rural" and "non-rural" categories and tightly controlled migration between urban and rural areas.

In a highly planned economy, the household registration rules restricted mass migration from the land to the cities to ensure social stability.

The system specifies where each Chinese person should live, normally where they were born. If they move, they lose rights to cheaper education and miss out on job opportunities.

Under the system, rural residents have little access to social welfare in cities and are restricted from receiving public services such as education, medical care, housing and employment, regardless of how long they may have lived or worked in the city.

The system also enables big city residents to have welfare privileges. In Beijing for example, it is easier for the Beijing hukou holders to matriculate from university than people from elsewhere in China. To add to their woes, migrant workers can't buy an affordable home in Beijing where housing prices surged about 50 percent last year.

Li said he himself fell victim of the hukou system, which is under increasing criticism and considered outdated as millions of Chinese have left their rural homes to find work in cities over the past three decades of economic reform and opening-up.

More than half of China's 1.3 billion population are rural household residents, of whom about 150 million migrant workers leave their rural homes to seek jobs in cities every year.

Calls for reform of the hukou system are growing as about 3,000 deputies from across the country convene in Beijing for the third session of the 11th National People's Congress (NPC), or China's top legislature, on Friday.

Dai Zhongchuan, a deputy to the NPC and vice president of the Law School of Huaqiao University, was among those proposing reform.

"After more than 30 years of reform and opening up, now is the time for our country to fine-tune the household registration system that the planned economy depended on," said Dai.

"In the past, supply of social resources was scarce and the hukou regulations helped stabilize society."

During the planned economy era, people who worked outside their authorized domain or geographical area would not qualify for grain rations, employer-provided housing, or health care.

"But the situation is different now, as the hukou system is a barrier to peasants integrating into city life and this is not in line with the country's irresistible trend of urbanization," said Dai.

He said the reform should enable migrant workers' access to basic education, housing and public facilities in cities.

"The migrant workers contribute to our country's urban construction and therefore they should enjoy the same treatment as urban residents," Dai said.

Newspapers across the country have repeatedly urged for an early reform of the household registration system, blaming it for the widening wealth gap in China.

Jiang Xiangmei, an NPC deputy from east China's Jiangxi Province, called for equal rights for migrant workers and an end to discrimination.

"The most urgent need is to solve the hukou problem," she said.

In separate proposals submitted to the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC, China's top political advisory body), several non-Communist parties, including the Jiu San Society, the China Association for Promoting Democracy, the China Democratic National Construction Association and the China Public Interest Party, all called for reform of the hukou system.

During an online chat with the public before the opening of the top legislature's annual session, Premier Wen Jiabao responded to the rising public opposition to the hukou system and promised reform.

Wen said reform was key to help the country's young rural migrant workers, who lived and worked in cities, to properly join urban society.

Trial reforms are underway in 11 provinces where migrants have been allowed to change their registration to take advantage of welfare and public services.

Beginning this year, northeast China's Jilin Province will gradually abolish the rural hukou and establish a unified household registration system that no longer categorizes the people into rural and non-rural.

To prevent unrest in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, experts recommend caution in pushing for a new and uniform system given China's diverse levels of development.

"In reforming the hukou system, a slight move in one part may affect the entire situation," said Prof. Zheng Fengtian, deputy dean of the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development of Renmin University. "It shouldn't be like a storm. We need to prepare in terms of tax, job creation, social security and other social welfare guarantees."

Though Li, the migrant worker from central Henan Province, knew he would very likely end up with an identity as a transient in big cities, he was reluctant to return to the countryside and plowing fields.

"I've left the land after I graduated from middle school and I didn't master farming skills," Li said. "If I returned to the fields, I would have real problems making a living.

"All I want is to enjoy the same opportunities and social welfare as a urban resident," he said.

Source:Xinhua
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