China Editorial Urges Sweeping Change to Household Registration

Daily News Article   —   Posted on March 2, 2010

(by Sky Canaves, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com) BEIJING – Thirteen local Chinese newspapers published an editorial urging authorities to reform the system of household registration that divides China’s rural and urban residents, in a bold call for reform days ahead of the start of the country’s annual legislative session.

Monday’s editorial represents a rare coordinated effort by Chinese media to speak out on a sensitive matter of major domestic importance. The piece describes the hukou household-registration system, adopted in the late 1950s to control population movement, in scathing terms as a source of injustice and a breeding ground for corruption. The system limits rural migrant workers’ access to city services and restricts their ability to settle permanently in urban areas.

“China has endured the bitterness of its household registration system for so long!” the editorial says. “We hold that individuals are born free, possessing the right to move freely!”

The editorial highlights growing public unhappiness with a system that officials have failed to change as rapidly as China’s population. Controls have been loosened to allow for a massive migration of labor from the countryside to cities over the three decades since China’s economic reforms started. But established urban residents continue to enjoy preferential access to subsidized education, health care and housing in the cities in which they are registered. Migrants face restrictions and often have to pay much more for benefits available to those with urban residency status.

Although not carried by leading state-run media outlets, Monday’s editorial was featured in several influential publications such as the Southern Metropolis Daily and the Economic Observer, and in newspapers with broad geographic coverage, from Inner Mongolia in the north to Yunnan province in the southwest. The editorial also was widely republished on Chinese Internet news portals.

The editorial contrasts the division perpetuated by the hukou system with China’s constitutional guarantees of equality for citizens. “For how many more generations will this division persist?” it asks.

Critics of the system have been calling for reform for years. But so far, only fairly superficial changes have been made, and it remains nearly impossible for low-income migrant workers to shift their household registrations to the any of the country’s sizable cities.

Still, the hukou system has been getting greater public attention lately, and reforming it is expected to be a topic of discussion at the National People’s Congress, the annual full session of the legislature that starts Friday. The authors of Monday’s article appealed to the NPC’s nearly 3,000 delegates, and those of a government advisory body that also convenes this week, to hasten the pace of reform.

Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted the need for further reform of the system in a public Internet chat session Saturday in response to a question about government efforts to improve the lot of rural migrants. The government is trying to encourage migrants to settle in smaller cities, but that effort is likely to fail unless such cities can manage to rival the employment opportunities found in the large urban areas favored by most migrants.

Authorities also are studying how to delink hukou status from the provision of social services as a way of boosting domestic consumption. If migrant workers and their families were able to enjoy benefits in the cities where they live and work on par with urban hukou holders, the thinking goes, they would focus less on saving and sending money back home and more on spending their increased disposable income. But so far, piecemeal measures implemented by local governments have resulted in wide disparity in conditions.

Write to Sky Canaves at sky.canaves@wsj.com.

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