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).
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