They build the skyscrapers and lay the highways, mind the city children, sew the clothes and tend the shops, but China’s army of migrant laborers are still fundamentally aliens in the country’s bustling urban centers.
Despite a push for reform ahead of this week’s annual legislative meeting, the household registration, or hukou (戶籍), system is likely to stay in place for the near future, slowing China’s rapid urbanization by denying city services to its estimated 200 million migrant workers.
Granting them rights in cities could encourage them to spend more, fulfilling the goals of central planners to raise Chinese consumption and reduce dependence on export markets.
Reformers were disappointed when Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), who has made fairness and reducing income disparities a hallmark of his administration, called for relaxing the hukou requirements only in small and medium cities in his work report this month.
He didn’t mention giving migrants equal treatment outside their provinces, or in China’s biggest cities.
As evidence the central authorities are not open to radical change, editorials calling for abolishment of the hukou system were removed from most of the Web sites of 13 regional newspapers.
The papers had launched a rare coordinated call for reform earlier this month.
The deputy editor who wrote the editorial for the Economic Observer was fired, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Defenders of the system contend cities are unable to provide the services migrants demand in the absence of a nationwide and transferable social security network.
“The main problem with changing this system is some powerful opposition, especially from the public security apparatus and the city governments who face a really high cost,” said Dorothy Solinger, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who has written about China’s hukou system.
“They’d have to expand schools for migrants as well as pensions and benefits for people who have moved temporarily, or even permanently, to the cities. There’s been a real plea from city governments not to burden them.”
Police oppose the abolition of the hukou system because they would lose control over China’s “floating population,” many of whom are poor. Migrants convicted of crimes often end up serving harsher sentences, because of confusion over jurisdictions, prisoners’ rights advocate, the Dui Hua Foundation (中美對話基金會), said.
FLOW OF REMITTANCES
Hukous date from the famines of the late 1950s, during Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) disastrous experiment with collective farms. Rations were tied to where people were registered, keeping starving peasants from flooding into better-fed cities.
Half a century later, a new generation of migrants call the cities home, with nary a glance back at the fields their grandparents tilled.
Reform would let them buy houses and bring their children to live with them, slowing the flow of remittances to villages.
“If I could change things, I’d get a Beijing hukou right away,” said Lu Zhaolu, a carefully made-up woman from northeast China whose 16-year-old attends a school for migrants in Beijing.
“There are a lot of advantages. For instance, I could apply for a mortgage to buy an apartment. Now I can’t get a loan.”
The migrant families who have settled in Beijing are now so permanent that city officials tolerate, but do not certify, about 260 schools each with 400 to 500 migrant students.
Several of those schools fell victim to developers’ bulldozers this winter, along with surrounding communities of makeshift housing.
“By sixth grade, some of our pupils have been through 15 schools. This really affects their education,” said Li Dengfeng, who runs a school for migrant children in Beijing’s outskirts.
Most migrant children only make it through junior high before dropping out to become laborers themselves, Li said.
Many jurisdictions have abolished the distinction between residents of urban and rural districts, in response to the rapid urbanization that has swallowed former villages into city sprawl.
That could help foster development of smaller cities across China, creating jobs closer to family and diverting labor from export centers like Guangdong. Localized shortages this month have led to talk of wage hikes.
FARAWAY FACTORIES
“Those who have been working outside the province for a long time already have quite settled jobs, already have homes,” said Zhang Zuoha (張作哈), vice-governor of Sichuan Province, which contributes 20 million rural people to the national labor pool.
“In each place they want to be accepted, get a household registration and resolve their household registration problems.”
No reforms have yet bridged provincial lines, even though the factories of the south and the coast attract migrant workers from thousands of miles and many provinces away.
Pension and medical insurance plans designed to allow workers to transfer between jobs generally don’t cross provincial lines, so workers are reluctant to pay into them.
That has resulted in one of the biggest contributions that migrant workers have made to China’s economic growth — their lack of legal protection has helped keep Chinese wages low.
“There’s more paperwork for outsiders to find jobs, and the salaries tend to be lower,” said Shi Jing, a young migrant shopkeeper with bleached hair and a fashionable green coat and leggings. “The job agencies don’t trust outsiders as much.”
Chinese such as Shi who have been migrants for more than a generation have little attachment to the hometowns where they are supposed to return for paperwork, medical reimbursements or for children to attend officially recognized schools.
“We need to change our attitudes towards migrants,” said Chang Dechuan (常德傳), president of Qingdao Port Group. “The old attitude was to use them because their wages are cheaper, and they cost less than city residents. I think this is outdated.”
“Nowadays, migrants are no longer just unskilled peasants.”
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
In Taiwan’s politics the party chair is an extremely influential position. Typically this person is the presumed presidential candidate or serving president. In the last presidential election, two of the three candidates were also leaders of their party. Only one party chair race had been planned for this year, but with the Jan. 1 resignation by the currently indicted Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) two parties are now in play. If a challenger to acting Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) appears we will examine that race in more depth. Currently their election is set for Feb. 15. EXTREMELY
They increasingly own everything from access to space to how we get news on Earth and now outgoing President Joe Biden warns America’s new breed of Donald Trump-allied oligarchs could gobble up US democracy itself. Biden used his farewell speech to the nation to deliver a shockingly dark message: that a nation which has always revered its entrepreneurs may now be at their mercy. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms,” Biden said. He named no names, but his targets were clear: men like Elon Musk
On Sept. 27 last year, three climate activists were arrested for throwing soup over Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery. The Just Stop Oil protest landed on international front pages. But will the action help further the activists’ cause to end fossil fuels? Scientists are beginning to find answers to this question. The number of protests more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 and researchers are working out which tactics are most likely to change public opinion, influence voting behavior, change policy or even overthrow political regimes. “We are experiencing the largest wave of protests in documented history,” says
RSS