Righting Residence Wrongs
March 12th, 2010
At the beginning of March this year 13 newspapers across China carried an editorial across their front pages calling for abolition of the hukou system. The hukou is a residence permit that ties a Chinese citizen to his hometown, disallowing permanent relocation to other cities without severe consequences. It’s the first time in Party history that such a strong critique about such a pillar of the centrally controlled society has been made. The Editor-in-Chief of the Economic Observer, an influential financial newspaper in China, authored the commentary. He was fired days after the editorial hit newsstands.
The hukou has served as the cornerstone of the command-and-control economy to freeze the residence of China’s citizens into either the cities or the countryside, with residents in the cities charged with feeding residents of the cities. The hukou also determines where and the extent of social services a citizen receives: in the countryside, of course, services such as education and health are more sparse and less expensive than in cities. The hukou also became a way of controlling births in locales, as it would be very difficult for a mother who was having more than her allotted children to escape to another town to have the child.
Now, though, with migrant workers making up substantial portions of the populations of many cities in China, having as many as half the annual births in a year, millions of Chinese families and their children are going without the kind of social services that make them and future generations competitive in a modernizing economy. Unfortunately, many city services are simply unprepared for the weight of yet more consumers depending on offerings that are already over-stretched.
The People’s Daily writes: “Beginning this year, northeast China’s Jilin Province will gradually abolish the rural hukou and establish a unified household registration system that no longercategorizes the people into rural and non-rural.”
With the opening of the People’s Party’s Congress this month, the topic will be sure to be discussed; however, with so many other issues slopping over each other it is a sure bet that phasing out the hukou will be a gradual, staged process.
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