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(CNSPHOTO) |
After 20 years of working as a stall-keeper in Beijing, 45-year-old Liu Yongping still lives in a rented basement with his wife and two children in the Tuanjiehu community in Chaoyang District.
In 1992, Liu came to the capital from a village in Nanyang, central Henan Province. He hoped to become a permanent resident in Beijing within a few years. But the capital's strict household registration system prevented him from gaining Beijing-resident status.
"Without a Beijing hukou (permanent residence permit), I feel my family is unwelcome in the city," Liu said. Having no access to social security benefits available to permanent Beijing residents, including medical and pension insurance, the family currently has to live on the 6,000-yuan ($952.38) income per month earned by Liu and his wife.
Liu is one of the 164 million Chinese who have migrated to cities from rural areas and helped fuel the country's economic growth. But across China, migrants with rural hukou have struggled to gain urban residence permits, as well as corresponding education, medical care, housing or employment services, regardless of how long they may have lived or worked in cities.
China's hukou system divides people into two basic categories—farmers and non-farmers. Under the system, farmers who move to cities cannot change their hukou status and therefore have little access to social security benefits for locals.
In 2011, the number of people living in China's cities exceeded the country's rural population for the first time in history. According to statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics, urban residents accounted for 51.27 percent of the country's total population of nearly 1.35 billion. But China has counted migrants staying six months or more as part of the resident population of a city since 2005.
Despite this, the historic demographic transition in China, which has been an agrarian nation for centuries, has diverted policymakers' attention toward making social security programs available to all people, regardless of their place of registered residence.
On February 23, the General Office of the State Council, China's cabinet, issued a national guideline on reform of the hukou system, pledging to provide equal access to public services for people living in urban areas without permanent residential permits.
Future policies and measures on essential public services, including employment assistance, compulsory education and occupational training, will not be based on whether one has a permanent residential permit or not, according to the guideline.
It also requested governments at all levels to revise or abolish existing policies and measures inconsistent with that principle.
"As migrant workers have made their contribution to urban development, they should also be given fair treatment when it comes to local social security benefits," said Zhang Chewei, Deputy Director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
China's hukou system, introduced in 1958, was meant to control the movement of people between urban and rural areas and maintain social order under a planned economy.
However, the country's reforms and adaptation to a market economy have resulted in record migration in recent years. Recent statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security show that the number of migrant workers reached 252.78 million in 2011, with 158.63 million of them leaving the villages they are registered to live in to seek employment elsewhere, usually in urban areas.
Migrant workers not only have little or no access to social security programs in cities, they also stand little chance of securing well-paid jobs in Beijing.
"The hukou system has played an important role as a basic data provider and for identity registration in the past, but the system is no longer rational given the irresistible trend of migration at present," said Duan Chengrong, Director of the Research Center for Population and Development at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.
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