广播听力: Hukou Reform Underway in China

It's been very difficult for those living in China's countryside to obtain official status as an urban resident even though they have lived in a particular city for years.

But this situation will undergo substantial changes as some provincial governments are carrying out reforms on the decades-old registration system.
 
Ying Ying has the details.




Forty-one-year old Kang Houjian is a construction worker in the southwestern city of Chongqing.

But the farmer-turned worker cannot get an official residency permit even though he has lived in the city for 25 years.

This has made him rather frustrated.

"The company pays for work-related injury insurance, pensions and medical insurance for workers who have official urban residency permits. But I cannot enjoy all these basic social welfare privileges."

Now Kang Houjian has learned he can soon obtain an official urban residency permit under the new polices of the Chongqing Municipality.

The municipal government has announced it will turn more than 3 million farmers, most of them migrant workers, into urban citizens within two years.

Under the new regulations, farmers working in downtown Chongqing for five years can apply for official urban residency permits.

Chongqing has a total population of about 33 million, including 23 million farmers.

The municipality aims to turn 10 million farmers into urbanites within 2020 by launching reforms on its "hukou", or household registration system.

Meanwhile, the Beijing Municipality also plans to ease its strict control on issuing residency permits to people from other regions in an effort to attract people with high-end skills.

The new policy states that selected people holding a Hukou from Beijing, Tianjin or Hebei Province can move freely and enjoy the same social welfare privileges in any of the three regions.

Analysts say these reforms expose the long-standing social inequality associated with China's Hukou system.
Dang Guoying, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says it's fundamental to deal with unequal social welfare in order for the Hukou system to be successfully reformed.

"In the future, I think we should achieve the goal of allowing people to easily register their Hukou at the region where he or she lives. To this end, we should first provide equal basic social welfare for all citizens regardless of where they were born."

China's Hukou system was set up in the 1950s to control the movement of people from rural to urban areas.
Under the policy, people with an urban Hukou enjoy better social welfare benefits, such as health care and education opportunities, than their rural counterparts.

For CRI, I'm Ying Ying.