Civil Registration in China: a discriminatory system against rural migrant workers

Archive from 12/22/2013

The Chinese system of civil registration has, for fifty years, crystallized economic and social disparities between rural and urban populations, leading to a two-tier society.

            Shanghai. In a poor and desolate area of the city, inside a police station, an old man is ruffling through his papers looking for a document. He is desperately trying to find that paper the clerk was asking about. His goal: to change his residency status in Shanghai from temporary to permanent. As a permanent resident, he would receive retirement benefits. Living in Shanghai since the 1980s, he has been trying to amend his registration papers for years but the process takes years in fees and administrative paperwork. Many others like him have long given up.  

            Today, millions of workers are confronted with the same problem. They are Chinese rural workers, who have come to big cities like Shanghai and Beijing in the 1980s in the hopes of finding work. However, as migrants, they do not benefit from the economic and social privileges urban residents have. They lack job security, government benefits and their children cannot enter public schools. Through this stigmatization, migrant workers have slowly fallen into the category of the underprivileged, of the low rank of the working class.

           

The Chinese civil registration system, the “hukou”, shares responsibility for these woes. It has, over the years, enforced structural discrimination by relegating migrant workers to barely-any-rights temporary residents or to no-rights-at-all undocumented.

            The “hukou” is a family certificate implemented in 1958 by the Mao regime to control populations and stop rural-to-urban migration. It assigns residency to a citizen at birth, which is then required to receive benefits from local governments. Today, the system keeps its original purpose of trying to curb rural-to-urban migration. If a person wishes to go work elsewhere, that person needs to ask for a temporary resident permit, which allows him to stay five years before heading back home.

During the Mao era, barely anyone was granted temporary resident status and the status did not allow for the worker to receive food stamps. Needless to say, leaving the home province was close to suicidal. Philippe Kantor, a Chinese expert and student in China in 1974-1975, explains how, during his two-year stay in Beijing, he never met someone from the countryside: “With tight border controls and the zoning of food rationing, no one would leave their hometown. Even in Beijing, foreigners were barred form certain zones, even from certain shops”.

Today, most migrant workers renew their permit several times so they can build a career in the city, where there is work. Yet, even with a stable job and property, getting a permanent resident permit is extremely difficult. And without it, health care, retirement benefits, accident-at-work insurance, even subway cards are impossible to get.

           

Xiao Wen, a 25 year-old writer for a business magazine in Shanghai, insists that she is paid less than others in her firm because of her temporary status. She comes from the Southern province of Anhui. She has been working in the company for two years. She also pays for work insurance, a standard procedure in her firm, but does not receive payment in case of an accident, being registered in Anhui for benefits. These are just a few of the flagrant inconsistencies of an administrative system bent on deterring migrants from accessing the overcrowded cities.

            To that effect, preferential treatment is systematically administered to urban citizens in big cities. Authorities consider migrants as being the scourge of the city. In employment, personal networking between urban residents is prevailing. In housing, non-urban workers are often denied ownership. In education, city diplomas are magnified. A college student explains that when she passes the National College Entrance Examination (the equivalent of the SATs) in her original rural province and then looks for a job in a big city, 10 points are taken off her record (on a total score of 750 points), on the assumption that the provincial exam is based on a lower standard than a city one.

            As the Communist Party met on November 8th 2013 for the Third Plenum to decide China’s economic guidelines for the next few years, rumors ran that government officials would consider amending the “hukou” system and open a commission to determine possible changes. But, as the official newspaper Xinhua expounded the results of the four-day meeting, no mention of the “hukou” occurred. Indeed, although an active enhancer of anti-rural discrimination, government is not prone to change a system, which it considers as an efficient way to control the explosive rural-to-urban migration. It protects the happy few urban rich who hold power and money, the 0,001% affluent part of the nation.