Thirteen Chinese newspapers carried an identical front-page editorial yesterday urging the abolition of the household registration hukou system in a highly unusual co-ordinated critique of government policy.
The editorial referred to “segregation” and “the heavy invisible fetters placed on all citizens”.
Hukouwas introduced in the 1950s after the Communist victory to help manage the planned economy and limit internal migration. Although since eroded by economic reform, it is still a deterrent for many citizens wanting to migrate from rural to urban areas.
Everyone in China is supposed to be registered at birth in their parents' location and is designated as a rural or urban citizen, eligible for social services such as health and education only in that location.
Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have flooded the cities in recent decades to work, but they often remain second-class citizensand are unable to gain access to most social services, including education for their children, because they cannot change their hukoustatus.
In Beijing alone, about half of the 460,000 children born in the past three years were not eligible for a hukou registration, according to Hu Xingdou, an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, and Li Fangping, an independent lawyer.
“The hukou system perpetuates highly discriminatory policies and social inequality; it violates China's constitution and should be abolished,” Mr Hu told the Financial Times.
Yesterday's editorial ran in the Economic Observer, an influential financial newspaper, and in 12 regional publications.
In language familiar to all students of early Chinese revolutionary literature, it opened with: “China has suffered under the bitter hukou system for too long!”
It spoke of a “hotbed of corruption”, because urban registrations can often be bought from unscrupulous officials, and called on delegates to China's political consultative committee and rubber-stamp parliament to push for its abolition at their annual meetings, due this week in Beijing.
In an online “chat” on Saturday, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, pledged reform, and Chinese political analysts said the editorial probably had the blessing of Communist party officials.
“I've never heard of Chinese newspapers jointly publishing an editorial on a specific policy matter like this – it is very unusual,” said Yao Yang, deputy dean of China's national school of development at Peking University. Mr Yao said the government was likely first to liberalise the hukou system in smaller cities.
Cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou already have given more permanent resident permits to higher-income migrants.
A shortage of migrant labour in southern Guandong province is worrying factory owners.
The World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development both recommend an overhaul of hukou.
