SUN
WUKONG How the hukou system
distorts reality By Wu Zhong,
China Editor
HONG KONG - The Chinese
Communist Party's 17th National Congress in the
autumn is expected formally to endorse President
Hu Jintao's idea of building a "harmonious
society" as the party line.
This has
boosted the hope that reforming the
five-decade-old, rigid hukou (household or
residency registration) system will be speeded up
after the all-important party meeting. The
outdated
hukou system has
increasingly become one of the major obstacles to
attaining social harmony in today's China.
China began to enforce the hukou
system in 1953, shortly after the Communist Party
came to power upon winning a civil war against the
Kuomintang. A major purpose was to facilitate the
implementation of a Stalinist-style socialist
command economy. The rationale was that production
was to meet the needs of the people rather than to
seek profits. Overproduction was evil.
Therefore, the government had to take care
of not only production but distribution as well.
But it had to have some idea about the needs of
people in various sectors before it could map out
production plans; hence came the idea of household
registration.
The failure of Mao Zedong's
"Great Leap Forward" movement in late 1950s forced
China to impose food rationing. And gradually
nearly everything was rationed because of
shortages. The command economy became a rationing
economy, for which the hukou system became
indispensable. In turn, rationing made it even
more rigid in that it was difficult for anyone to
change his residency registration.
Because
of shortages, the government could only provide
food, housing, employment, medical care, education
and social welfare to urban residents, leaving
farmers to make it on their own. In China's
agrarian tradition, peasants were believed to be
able to live a self-sufficiently. Thus the
hukou system was used to restrict rural
residents from moving into cities, to curb the
growth of the urban population and hence ease the
government's burden.
It was thus ironic
that while socialism was to eliminate social
classes, the hukou system virtually fixed
Chinese people into two big classes: urban
citizens and rural residents or farmers. It was
almost impossible for a rural resident to change
categories. His big chance was to pass the tough
university entrance exams so that he could be
assigned a job in a city after graduation. Nor
could an urban citizen freely change his
registration from one city to another,
particularly from a smaller city to a bigger one.
The registration of a newborn baby, no
matter where he was born, followed that of his
parents. But if one of his parents was a rural
resident, more often than not, the baby would be
registered as a rural resident.
During
Mao's times, this rigid system was also used as an
effective instrument in restricting social
mobility. Not only was a citizen's freedom to
migrate to another place stripped away, his
freedom to travel inside the country was also
restricted. One had to live in the place where he
was registered, and could not travel to another
place without permission.
It is ridiculous
that such a system should remain largely intact
despite the fundamental changes to both the
economy and society that have been brought by
economic reform and opening up over the past
nearly three decades. Today, Chinese citizens,
including rural residents, are free both to travel
and to migrate across the country - but they are
still not allowed to change their registration
easily.
Such a situation is particularly
unfair to rural migrant workers. Since the early
1980s, vast numbers of farmers have left their
land to work and live in cities. According to
official estimates, the number of such rural
migrant workers is now more than 200 million, with
at least half of them "permanently" settled in the
cities. It is expected that in the next several
years, an additional 100 million or even more
rural migrants will move to cities.
But in
reality, the obsolete system means that rural
migrant workers, no matter how long they have
lived in cities, or if their children have been
born and raised in the cities, are not regarded as
urban citizens. Their registration still
classifies them as rural residents, and so they
are not entitled to the same rights and benefits
that urban citizens enjoy. Rural migrants are
therefore only the cheap labor that contributes to
the prosperity of the cities but is not allowed to
benefit from it.
Municipal governments in
China nowadays like to boast their achievements by
using the growth of the local per capita gross
domestic product. While rural migrants make
contributions to the local economy, city
governments do not include all of them in their
calculation of local per capita GDP, so the figure
could be inflated.
For instance, more than
10 million people now are estimated to be living
in Shenzhen, but only 1.5 million are registered
to live there. Three million have permanent
residency, while the rest, more than 5 million,
remain classified as migrant workers, which means
they are "aliens", despite the decades some have
spent there.
The Shenzhen police force is
staffed to serve a population of about 3 million,
which is a big reason for the deterioration of
social order there.
Wang Chunguang, a
researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, says that if discrimination against
rural migrants is not eliminated, social problems
will continue to fester.
"Many of them
have lived and worked in cities for more than 20
years now and have lost their farmland and their
farming skills. If the cities where they have
worked ... for so many years do not accept them,
where shall they go?" said Wang.
When
urbanization is taking away land from more and
more farmers, driving them into cities, if they
are not urban citizens, what are they? By
definition, urbanization means the process by
which the proportion of city residents in an
entire population expands. By this definition, the
more than 100 million rural migrant workers
definitely must be considered as urban dwellers.
The hukou system simply distorts the
reality.
Seeing the problem, the central
government in 1992 began to consider scrapping the
distinction between urban and rural residents. But
no progress was made in the decade that followed.
In late 2005, the Ministry of Public Security,
which oversees hukou, pledged to pilot the
reform in some provinces. But months later it said
it was up to the local government to make the
changes in their systems.
However, it is
in the city governments where the resistance is
strongest. It means the municipal government would
have to spend extra funds to expand facilities and
public services to accommodate growth. For
instance, Shenzhen would have at least to triple
its police force to maintain social order at the
minimal level, not to mention updating other
public facilities and services in the city.
Hence for a city government the
hukou system remains a strong defense line
for its prosperity. From this perspective, to ask
a city government to initiate reform would be
somewhat like "asking a tiger to give away its
fur", as a Chinese saying puts it. Therefore, it
is necessary that the reform be enforced directly
by the central government.
Apparently, the
outdated system has become a source of social
injustice in that it leads to discrimination of
rural migrant workers. Social injustice threatens
social harmony. To implement Hu's idea of building
up a "harmonious society", social injustice must
be corrected. Consequently, ahead of the 17th
Party Congress, which is to endorse Hu's idea as
the party's line, there is hope in China that
reform will soon be on its way - and this time, it
will not be just another case of crying wolf.
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