THE MEGA city of Chongqing yesterday launched a pilot reform of residence permit laws which will give migrant workers from the countryside equal rights in Chinese cities.
The reform of the so-called hukou system is a major development because it could prompt massive urbanisation – the goal of the reform is to turn 10 million farmers into urbanities within 10 years and result in 60 per cent of the Chinese population living in cities.
Chongqing is the biggest city in the world, taken as a municipal area, with 32.8 million residents. However, the actual city itself is much smaller, and the municipality covers a large rural area too, including 23.3 million farmers.
More than eight million farmers have become migrant workers, including 3.9 million working and living in urban areas of Chongqing.
The city used to be part of Sichuan but is now directly managed by Beijing.
Its mayor is former trade czar Bo Xilai and it has a progressive reputation.
In recent decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have moved from the countryside to work in the cities, but they do not enjoy resident status in the cities, only in their hometowns.
The hukou system was set up in 1958 to control the movement of people between urban and rural areas.
The migrants in the cities do not get the same healthcare, social welfare or education benefits, and often have to leave their children behind them with their grandparents in their home towns to make sure they get education.
The government acknowledges that millions of migrant workers are underpaid or working in poor conditions and has made efforts to improve their lot by eliminating restrictions on companies employing them, opening up public job agencies and providing information and training.
Under the new rules, farmers who do business in urban Chongqing for five years or in rural areas for three years can apply to become urban citizens, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The Chongqing municipal government said it aimed to turn 3.38 million farmers, mainly the new generation of migrant workers born in the 1980s and 1990s, into urban citizens within two years.
It’s commonly accepted that China’s future will be lived out in the cities.
China has seen the number of city dwellers rise from 17.8 per cent of the populace in 1978 to 45.7 per cent in 2008, a rise of 27.9 percentage points in the past 30 years.
Some 300 million Chinese now living in rural areas – equal to the population of the US – will move to cities in the next 20 years.
Demographics experts expect the country’s rural population to shrink by more than half in the next three decades, to 400 million from 900 million now.
By 2025, at least 220 Chinese cities will be likely to have more than one million people.
In January the central committee of the Communist Party of China issued a document urging that urban and rural development be better balanced.
A key part of such a mission is to make the household registration system fairer for a new generation of migrant workers.