A woman dressed in the traditional costume of the Yao ethnicity holds her Chinese ID card and household registration. (Photo: Cui Meng/GT)
Relaxed threshold helps rural people enjoy fruits of development
All 31 provincial-level regions across China have rolled out a policy to reform the household registration system, or hukou, a move that is being hailed by analysts as a milestone that will facilitate inter-city migration and boost urbanization.
South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region announced recently that its reform policy will come into effect on December 1, and will help rural people who move to cities in the region enjoy the access to urban resources including medical care, public education and endowment insurance after they transfer their hukou status.
The reform removes requirements for years of residency and employment for rural people in order to register for an urban hukou. Rural people's rights to contract rural land and rights to use their homestead are preserved, according to an official statement on Guangxi government's website.
Guangxi's policy favors rural people and could be seen as compensation as the group has made great contributions to China's development but has not reaped many of the rewards, Guan Xinping, a professor of social policy at Nankai University in Tianjin, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
The migration of rural residents to cities can also inject vigor into the local economy, he said.
Household registration is a crucial document entitling residents to purchase houses, register vehicles, and gain access to public services. As cities expand, governments at all levels are reforming the system to lower the threshold for migrants to obtain an urban hukou.
China is moving to advance the relaxation of permanent residency restrictions for rural population working in cities in a bid to improve the mobility of people and promote urbanization, the National Development and Reform Commission said in April.
Restrictions on permanent residence permits should be scrapped in cities with populations between 1 million and 3 million.
For cities with populations of 3 million to 5 million, the qualifications for such permits should be "relaxed."
Some 100 million migrant workers and rural residents are expected to obtain urban hukou and help achieve the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all aspects by 2020.
To accommodate such large number of residents, cities need to figure out how they can offer sufficient jobs and improve supporting public services, Xu Youlin, a government official from Shangrao, East China's Jiangxi Province, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Zheng Gongcheng, president of China Association of Social Security told the Global Times, that easing the restrictions is a progressive step in the reform of household registration. The ultimate goal is to offer public services to all residents regardless of hukou status.
According to Zheng, current barriers for further relaxation of hukou rules lie in unbalanced resource allocation between existing urban hukou holders and the newcomers and unbalanced social resources between cities. The current easing policy targets narrowing the gap between existing residents and migrants, while enhancing the urban resources of some cities will require greater big-picture design, he said.
To address the resource unbalance in education, medical care, property and endowment insurance, authorities could use "the invisible hand of the market", said Su Jian, director of the National Center for Economic Research at Peking University.
