Hukou reform
Urbanization means there are many rural migrants to cities. However, China's
hukou system makes life difficult for the migrants.
The household registration system (
hukou) determines where children go to school, where families receive medical care, and where people can take advantage of most government services. The registrations are not transferable. If your family is registered in rural Shandong, you'll not be eligible for any services if you move to Beijing.
This puts a break on recruiting workers who are needed in urban areas and great hardships on those who migrate.
Is the Vice-Premier a high enough official to prompt reforms?
Vice Premier calls for accelerating household registration reform
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| Zhang Gaoli |
Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli Friday urged increased efforts to meet urbanization reform targets while speeding up household registration system reform.
Zhang, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks when addressing a teleconference on the reform of the national household registration system…
Zhang stressed the target of increasing the ratio of registered urban residents to 45 percent of the total population by 2020. The ratio was 35.9 percent at the end of 2014…
He also called for reforming accompanying policies of urbanization and providing newly-settled urban residents with better public services.
The household registration system, which has divided the nation into rural and urban populations since the 1950s, provides access to education, health care and other public services.
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Labels: China, household registration, hukou, urbanization
And the latest word on residential permit reform from Beijing…
Urbanization has been going on at a dramatic pace in China for the last three decades. But public policy is still mired in the 1980s. The topic sort of arose during the recent NPC meeting, but not soon enough for any public notice. Plans are underway. Whose plans? Whose goals? Whose process? (Never mind. Just follow directions.)
If you check out the "See also" notes at the bottom, the process of policy making seems to be the same as it was in the past: slow.
Moving on up
AFTER months of bickering among officials, on March 16th the government revealed a long-awaited plan for managing what has been the world’s largest migration of rural residents into cities… It called for a “new style” of urbanisation, focused on making cities fairer for migrants. This will require considerable government spending, and will meet tough resistance.
It is remarkable that a government so fond of planning has taken this long to produce a plan for urbanisation; in the past 35 years the population of urban China has grown by more than 500m people…
The new document reflects a shift in city-building strategy that has become evident since new leaders took over in China in 2012; it recognises that urban China risks being destabilised by the creation of a huge mass of what the Chinese media sometimes admit are “second-class citizens”. The plan calls for the “gradual elimination” of the chief cause of this: the hukou system of household registration that was introduced in the 1950s to prevent internal immigration…
By 2020, according to the plan, 100m migrants are to obtain urban hukou. This is a cautious target. The government admits it would still leave 200m people—by then roughly two-thirds of migrants—without city-resident status…
Crucially, the plan does not suggest when the hukou system might be scrapped altogether. And it still allows bigger cities, which migrants prefer, to continue using hukou barriers as a way of trying to limit population growth…
Local governments are likely to interpret this as strictly as they can. They are fearful of having to spend a lot more on public services such as health care, education and subsidised housing, which barely reach most non-urban hukou holders. The new plan gives few details of how beefing up these services will be paid for, an omission that suggests much bickering remains to be done…
The plan also gives a nod to the aspirations of China’s new middle-class, some of whom are pressing for a greater say in how their cities are run. The “level of democratisation”, it says, should be increased in the drawing up of city plans. Officials, however, chose to keep the plan secret until after the closing of the annual session of the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature. It would have been a pity to spoil it with debate, even by a rubber-stamp parliament from which migrants are all but excluded.
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Labels: China, demographics, policy, politics, urbanization
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing on a huge scale
The guiding ideology of the Communist elite in China has seemed to be control from the top down. Socialism has always come in second to the authoritarian impulse. Historically, that's the Chinese way (in theory).
Everything from civil society to the military is run the by a tiny elite.
Now may be the time to dust off memories of
The Great Leap Forward, because China seems about to embark on another huge-scale social engineering project. It would put the elite back in charge of a process that's been going on for more than a decade: urbanization.
China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities
China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years…
This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers…
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| Farmer searching village rubble |
Across China, bulldozers are leveling villages that date to long-ago dynasties. Towers now sprout skyward from dusty plains and verdant hillsides. New urban schools and hospitals offer modern services, but often at the expense of the torn-down temples and open-air theaters of the countryside…
The building frenzy is on display in places like Liaocheng, which grew up as an entrepôt for local wheat farmers in the North China Plain. It is now ringed by scores of 20-story towers housing now-landless farmers who have been thrust into city life. Many are giddy at their new lives — they received the apartments free, plus tens of thousands of dollars for their land — but others are uncertain about what they will do when the money runs out…
Top-down efforts to quickly transform entire societies have often come to grief, and urbanization has already proven one of the most wrenching changes in China’s 35 years of economic transition…
The broad trend began decades ago. In the early 1980s, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the countryside versus 47 percent today, plus an additional 17 percent that works in cities but is classified as rural. The idea is to speed up this process and achieve an urbanized China much faster than would occur organically…
Most of the costs are borne by local governments. But they rely mostly on central government transfer payments or land sales, and without their own revenue streams they are unwilling to allow newly arrived rural residents to attend local schools or benefit from health care programs. This is reflected in the fact that China officially has a 53 percent rate of urbanization, but only about 35 percent of the population is in possession of an urban residency permit, or hukou. This is the document that permits a person to register in local schools or qualify for local medical programs.
The new blueprint to be unveiled this year is supposed to break this logjam by guaranteeing some central-government support for such programs, according to economists who advise the government. But the exact formulas are still unclear. Granting full urban benefits to 70 percent of the population by 2025 would mean doubling the rate of those in urban welfare programs...
Look for more articles to come in this series, "Leaving the Land."
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Labels: China, history, political culture, politics, urbanization
