Updated: 2014-09-05 12:30
By Li Yang in Shanghai(China Daily USA)
For nearly 40 years, Chinese cities have used migrant workers for such services as plumbers and waiters to hairdressers and truck drivers without giving them the welfare benefits that come with being legal residents.
Now the cities are faced with how to turn 100 million migrants into residents as required by the central government's urbanization program.
Under the name of opening doors for all, some big cities have tried a point-based residence system, which tilts overwhelmingly to an applicant's education and professional background. In practice, most people obtaining residence registration, or hukou, through the system are college graduates working as teachers, lawyers, engineers and doctors.
A hukou holder can enjoy such welfare benefits as healthcare, education and pension. In some cities, only local hukou holders are qualified to buy a house or even a car.
Most of the 300 million migrant workers in China are junior middle-school graduates and lower. They are basically excluded from the point-based residence system, irrespective of their indispensability to a city.
They lack normal vocational training and official certificates to prove their skills and techniques that are recognized by the system. The reality is, they are integral parts of a city in such jobs as bricklayers, assemble line workers, chefs, couriers and dustmen.
Farmers could work in cities after China started its marke
t reforms in the late 1970s. This third generation of migrant workers is now at the marrying age, but few of them have been readily accepted by cities.
China's current urbanization rate is higher than 53 percent, but nearly one-third of the residents in urban areas are migrant workers without the full citizenship rights given in cities.
For now it is necessary to control big cities' population by hukou because of limited natural resources and government budgets. At the same time, it is also necessary to grant new hukou in an orderly and calculated manner through the progressive point-based residence system.
"One important function of the system is to guarantee people the freedom to move from place to place," said Zheng Zizhen, a demographic research with the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences (GASS) and the designer of the first Guangdong point-based system copied from a similar immigration system in Hong Kong.
"The farmers should give up their land in the countryside if they choose to earn an urban hukou. They should not enjoy advantages of both sides at the same time," Zheng said.
"I think, as the Hong Kong system indicates, education is the core requirement. So education, professional ranks and techniques are the most important indexes," he added.
China has not yet constructed a basic social-welfare net covering all nationals. The large welfare gap between city and village remain a large social unfairness. Bridging the gap does not conflict with attracting talent for cities, if the entry mechanism is balanced.
Behind the point-based residence system there is an obvious mismatch between Hong Kong's system and the reality of China's urbanization, and the presence of deep-rooted professional discrimination toward blue-collar workers.
Hong Kong's developed economy uses its point-based system to select the talent it needs most from around the world. But the main purpose of the system is to lift institutional barriers that divide the urban and the rural, and give migrant workers their overdue welfare benefits. It is unfair to put college-graduate professionals and farmer-turned migrant workers on the same competitive level.
"There is no doubt the city governments are hungry for talents. But a city cannot only have well-educated people. It is unrealistic to require all applicants to complete college education. In global cities like New York and Tokyo, only about 30 percent population has received higher education," said Fu Weigang, a researcher of economy with Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law.
A research by Lu Ming, a professor studying urbanization at Shanghai Jiaotong University indicates each high-tech industry job in developed economies can bring about five jobs in the other fields, among which two are in the senior service sector like doctors and lawyers, the other three are in consumption service industries, such as cashiers, waiters and mailmen.
"The city is different from the village in that it brings about labor distribution with the aggregation of people coming from various education and job backgrounds," said Ding Li, a sociologist with GASS. "The governments are actually selecting the talent they need most through the system to boost local economy. The designers have not made breakthroughs in the new system from the old population-control policies."
Urbanization professor Lu Ming said if the local governments do not want to embrace so many new urban hukou holders now, they should take concrete actions to realize and protect farmers' property rights over their land, a principle settled last year by the central government for land reform and urbanization, and implemented well by local governments.
Shanghai's government provides an alternative to introducing a point-based residence certificate system.
Under the Shanghai system, how much social welfare a residence certificate holder can receive depends on his or her points in a scale that satisfies not only college-graduate professionals, but also migrant workers who have consistently worked and lived in Shanghai for a certain period of time.
"The residence-certificate system is much better than the sweeping-approach hukou system because it respects different people's contribution to a city and can ensure the diversity and value of the newcomers," said Ren Yuan, a sociologist with Shanghai-based Fudan University.
"The significance of the residence-certificate system is that it points migrant workers in a clear direction on how they can obtain urban welfare step by step, and even a full hukou at last, through their own efforts for the first time in history."