China declared on Wednesday that it would make reforms to the hated hukou system, claiming that there will no longer be any distinction between urban and rural hukou holders.
The system, which has been around since the Mao era, has divided Chinese citizens into a two-tiered class system: those with the urban hukou, who get generous urban social services; and those who hold the rural hukou, who don't get equal benefits and government services in China's cities. Possessing the 'wrong' kind of hukou has been posing huge social problems for millions of migrant workers and their families, making their lives miserable.
China's cabinet, the State Council, has said that the reforms on the household registration were intended to encourage the rural population to migrate to the cities for employment and education, in order to strengthen the "protection" of China's major cities.
The improved system will no longer be based on a person's birthplace, but rather on a person's place of residence, thereby making the transfer of hukou registrations possible.
As big of a deal the reforms seem, they really won't make much of a difference for most people. Chinese people will still see their government benefits based on the town or city in which their hukou is registered, making it easier only on the formerly rural hukou holders to move to smaller, lower-tier cities, but not to any of China's first-tier cities where the better-paying jobs and superior infrastructure and public services are actually located.
Beijing-based lawyer Cheng Hai calls the new rules "a mess" and stated that the hukou system still poses a heavy burden on citizens. He said:
By law, people should be allowed to move hukou freely from one place to another. Someone's hukou should be issued wherever they live.
A hukou registration is purely for gathering population data; it shouldn't have any other purpose.
He went on to say that the "so-called reforms" are just a refinement of the existing state of affairs.
The reforms seem related to premier Li Keqiang's acclaimed “urbanization” plan to vamp up the domestic economy by moving 100 million now-rural residents to cities by the year 2020. In theory, the new policy will help open up small cities to now-rural residents who will find employment and boost the local economy in those underdeveloped provinces, but the "build it and they will come" model of urbanization does not address what motivates so many millions of people to relocate the country's eastern metropolises so far away from home. If fourth-tier cities nearer to their children and parents had the same hospitals and schools and offered the same opportunities, they'd probably be there already instead of Shanghai, Guangzhou or Shenzhen.
China's government hopes that urbanization will give 45% of China's 1.3 billion population access to healthcare and education, a statistic as low as 35.7% as of now. A report made by the Beijing University shows an alarmingly increasing gap between the rich and poor in China, with the top 1% of households controlling more than a third of the country's wealth.
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