Outdated system denies migrants full city rights

Videos
Photos

By Xiong Lei (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-21 08:26

For years I have followed their struggle for a living in Beijing.

She is from rural Sichuan and started her adventure in Beijing as a maid at a home. Yearning to have a life more independent and exciting, she chose to study hairdressing and beauty treatment.

He is from rural Hubei and came to Beijing some 10 years ago as a hairdresser. He came to know her while working as the master hairdresser for a beauty salon and they fell in love and got married.

Now they have opened a barber shop with their years' savings and managed to hire several assistants. Their five-year-old daughter is attending a community kindergarten with local kids in Beijing. The little girl looks no different from other pals whose parents are Beijing natives.

Pretty much the couple have settled down in Beijing.

But not quite. They still want an official residence certificate that recognizes their citizenship in the Chinese capital.

This recognition, however, is hard to come by under the current household registration system, which divides urban citizens from rural dwellers.

Without that certificate, or with their household registration still in rural areas, it will be hard for the couple's girl to have a full education in Beijing. Even if she could manage to finish junior high school in the Chinese capital, under the current system she has to return to her hometown - which will be totally strange to her - to finish senior high school and take college entrance examinations there if she wishes to go on for higher learning.

It sounds ridiculous, but it is China's reality, a reality many are calling to change.

Indeed, China's dual residential registration system, now 50 years old, is out of date and needs reform.

When the system that fixes rural dwellers on land was first introduced in the 1950s, it was designed to stabilize the new regime and facilitate the land reform in rural China.

At a time when labor supply was deficient and the labor force was needed to recover agricultural production severely damaged by war, the system might have been necessary to keep the nation going.

It should be noted that while the system restricted the population mobility, there were channels open for some peasants to move from villages to towns and cities. Factories recruited workers in rural areas, all in a planned way, and college enrollments were tilted in favor of students from the countryside.

Another way for rural youths to go to the cities was through the army - once they joined the army and got promoted, they could secure a job in cities when demobilized.

Meanwhile, medical workers and people in other urban services were encouraged to go to the rural areas to help improve the peasants' livelihood.

Efficient or not, the measures reflected a desire to narrow and gradually eliminate the gap between rural and urban areas. And, even if rural life was not rich, peasants as a basic leading force of the People's Republic of China enjoyed a high social status.

But the swift transition from the planned economy to the market-oriented economy since the 1980s has shattered the old pattern as well as the backup for the old system.

Pretty soon the peasants were left on their own. All the previous services for peasants were gone, along with the fringe benefits they were endowed with, meager as they were.

As many peasants found themselves surplus in farming, they headed for cities to seek new opportunities. But the household registration system is still in function, which, now deprived of all the services backing it up, became simply a rigid instrument to restrain the migrant peasant workers from enjoying a city life fully.

When a group of people can only work in cities but are not entitled to the rights and benefits on an equal footing with the permanent residents in the city, they are likely to become targets of discrimination. That is when a reform of the system is needed.

Fortunately, the removal of the obstacles for migrant peasant workers to settle down in cities has found its way on many local governments' agenda and efforts have been made toward removing those obstacles.

The first step was to improve the teaching quality and facilities of the schools for migrant rural workers' kids and legalize them. The education authorities should also make it mandatory for the urban schools to accept migrant workers' kids. Years ago, urban schools charged extra fees for children of migrant rural workers, which few of them could afford. And the private schools run for such children were often denied legitimacy by the education authorities.

The issue was put up at many local people's congresses and the overwhelming public opinion held that it was against the law on compulsory education. That changed the situation for migrant workers' children to receive a normal education if they chose to live with their parents in cities.

And that is how the barber shop owner couple could send their daughter to a Beijing community's kindergarten.

Perhaps there is still a long way to go before they could get an official residential certificate in Beijing. But things are more hopeful now as several cities are introducing new household registration system which allows migrant peasant workers to settle down in the cities if they wish to.

And except for the college entrance examinations, household registration certificates are playing a far less significant role in our life than they did years ago. Some scholars have been talking about replacing them with the ID cards.

More significantly, migrant peasant workers have now got their deputies in the legislation bodies at various levels, up to the top one, the National People's Congress. Although they are still in a token presence, one can expect their capacity to participate in politics will grow and they will have more say on policymaking in matters concerning their benefits.

Then, I hope, people like my barber shop owner couple friends will fully enjoy a city life just as you and me.

The author is a council member of China Society for Human Rights Studies

(China Daily 08/21/2008 page10)