Household Registrations

This is a guest post from JL.  Here is a deeper explanation of the Household Registration system and migrant workers in China.

Actually even I don’t really know what the "Chinese Dream" is, but I do know about the registration thing. In history, the government has employed a strategy which was meant to make some people/areas rich first then they would help others to get rich too, which has resulted in the uneven distribution of social resources. The government taxed every family in the whole country, then the central government invested in the coastal cities to implement the policy of making some people or areas richer first. So those areas have developed and, of course, have better social welfare, education, healthcare and so on. Now those cities are not willing to share their wealth with the outsiders/migrant workers and they make policies based on "Household Registration".  (Everybody is registered to their parents’ Household Registration address not where you were born; a person whose parents are from the village can’t or find it very difficult to shift their Household Registration to the city as a city resident.)  So the policy is written to grant city residents (people whose Household Registrations are in the city) the rights of welfare, healthcare, public education for children, and certain jobs, while migrant workers from the villages are not given those same privileges although they both live in the same city. So basically we can say "WHERE YOU LIVE IS NOT ALWAYS EQUAL TO WHERE IS YOUR HOUSEHOLD REGISTRATION IS". Supposing I am from a village and I am now living in Beijing, but my Household Registration is still in the village, I can’t have the same rights as the person whose Household Registration is in Beijing. My kids can’t have the same rights as other people whose Household Registration is at Beijing (They can’t go to the same school, they can’t take college entrance examination in Beijing even if they grew up in Beijing and went to school in Beijing) .  So to sum up: people living and working in the same city have different rights. They do the same job, but have different pay (temporary hire-fire anytime, taking all faults and permanent hire).