Census takers counting China's more than 1.3 billion people already face a daunting task, and it's getting harder for the latest once-a-decade update。
After years of reforms that have reduced the government's once-pervasive involvement in most people's lives, some Chinese are proving reluctant to give up personal information and harboring suspicions about what the government plans to do with their details. "Along with China's development, the people's awareness of legal, personal and privacy rights has been increasing," said an official of Beijing whose office is overseeing the census in the capital. "When we were little, it wasn't this way. If the police wanted to check hukous (Chinese household-registration documents)， they would just walk in with barely a knock. You can't do that anymore," he said。
"Some people resist it because they may worry about how the information might be used by the government to investigate their wealth, for example, how many properties they have or perhaps they don't want their 'gray income' to become public. These people are often rich or corrupt," said Liu Shanying, associate researcher with the Institute of Political Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Those concerns may be well-founded. The State Statistics Bureau will use the census to examine the real-estate market in parts of several cities to determine how many homes were purchased by speculators and are sitting empty, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday。
Accounting for a population more than four times the size of the US' is set to take place from November 1 to 10. Currently, census volunteers are going door to door across China, taking an initial poll of how many people live in each home and recording cellphone numbers so workers can get in touch when the census officially begins。
Some Chinese cited other reasons for objections to the pre-census poll. Guo Ying, a 31-year-old office worker in Beijing, said he would participate but questioned whether there was any point to it. He wondered whether the results would be accurate。
Taking an accurate census in China is a difficult task with the millions of migrant workers who've left their official addresses in the countryside for opportunities in the cities. Another complicating issue: children born in violation of the country's one-child policy, many of whom are unregistered and therefore have no legal identity. They could number in the millions。
China Population Census official Gu Yili brushed aside questions about concerns over improper use of census information or other potential violations of personal rights. "The government needs an accurate figure to make appropriate policy and people need to cooperate. It's in the best interest of ordinary people," she said。