China’s Major Cities Withhold the Welcome Mat for Villagers

Han Chun and her daughter make for a pair of unlikely phantoms.

They look real enough, a mother and toddler struggling to get by on the western edge of Beijing. Friends call Han by name. She shops at the local market alongside her neighbors. Two-year-old Han Ye romps with playmates at a nearby day-care center.

Together with Han’s husband, they seem the model of a hard-working Chinese family. Yet by the city’s reckoning, Han Chun and Han Ye are complete nonentities: invisible and unacknowledged, officially null and void.

What consigns them to this shadowy purgatory is their lack of the proper permits to live in Beijing. Han comes from a poor village in eastern China. Though she has been married to a native Beijinger for four years, and though Han Ye was born in the Chinese capital, neither mother nor daughter is recognized as a legitimate resident.

They are victims of one of the world’s biggest experiments in social control: China’s household registration system, a stubborn relic of the old command economy that some experts have likened to South Africa’s former apartheid system.

For decades, the policy has severely restricted where Chinese can live and work, tying most of the nation’s 1.3 billion people to the places they were born and walling off society into rigid rural and urban populations.

The market reforms of the last 20 years have poked holes in the system, allowing freer movement and creating a vast pool of internal migrants who leave their villages in the countryside to seek better fortunes in China’s bursting cities.

The plight of these undocumented workers is similar to that of illegal immigrants in the U.S. Migrant laborers occupy the lowest rung of the urban social ladder and are blamed for increasing crime and relegated to jobs no one else wants--sweeping restaurant floors and gleaning recyclable items from garbage dumps. They qualify for none of the benefits that legal city residents expect as their due, from health care to pensions to schooling for their children.

Government Moves to Ease the Rules

In October, the Chinese government finally began to catch up with reality by easing the rules somewhat, allowing peasant farmers to move to 20,000 smaller towns and cities across the country and to apply for a coveted urban hukou, the Chinese term for household registration.

Officials know that freer movement of labor is crucial for China’s continued economic development, especially after its entry into the World Trade Organization this month.

“The registration system that has existed for more than 40 years is being slowly dismantled,” the Guangming Daily newspaper said. “The idea that peasants can become city dwellers is no longer just a dream.”

The word “slowly,” however, is the key.

The relaxed regulations do not cover major hubs like Beijing or Shanghai, two of China’s most affluent cities and most alluring destinations.

And despite improved prospects for many migrants, the loosened rules still overlook countless others, including a particular subset of people like Han Chun: rural folk whose only “mistake” was to marry urbanites.

There are millions of such cases, residents penalized simply because of whom they fell in love with, often forced to live like second-class citizens. And, experts say, almost all of these people are women.

Here in Beijing, they make up a large proportion of the estimated 820,000 non-permit-holding long-term residents (excluding temporary migrant workers) out of a population of 14 million. Collectively, these women are known as waijiajing--”outside” women married to Beijing men.

For them, life is often harsher than it is for the single young women who come here from the countryside looking for work and often bounce around in search of jobs. Many ultimately go back to their hometowns to settle down.

But the waijiajing are captive to their adopted city, anchored by their responsibilities as wives and mothers. They no longer belong to their old villages, but neither are they officially welcomed or acknowledged in their new environment. They live in limbo.

“Their situations are worse than migrant girls,” said Li Tao, a journalist who has researched the problem. “As wives of Beijingers, they can’t move on to other cities looking for work,” yet they also lose their inheritances and land rights back in their home villages.

“Many of these women are very disappointed but are nonetheless strong,” Li said, “which is why I admire them.”

Han, 35, came to Beijing 10 years ago on an educational fellowship--the chance of a lifetime for a young woman from backwater Anhui province who had to drop out of school so that her impoverished parents could send her brothers instead.

“It was my bridge to the city,” said Han, who brims with the hard-won confidence of one who is self-taught. “I wanted to find a way here to learn, to try out new surroundings, maybe look for work.”

Like Mother, Like Daughter

She met her husband, Han Jinxing, in 1995. They married in 1997 and joyfully welcomed Han Ye a year later. But under the cold-eyed hukou system, Han is still not allowed to transfer her household registration to Beijing. And because one’s hukou is inherited through one’s mother, apple-cheeked Han Ye is also not a legal resident.

“My daughter has no hukou at all at the moment,” Han said. “I know it’s difficult to get a Beijing residence permit, so I tried getting her one from my hometown. But they wouldn’t issue her one either, so right now she’s essentially persona non grata.”

The absence of legal registration eats at Han’s life and peace of mind constantly, in ways both large and small.

At worst, she and her daughter risk expulsion from Beijing during the city’s occasional police sweeps of unregistered residents. So Han ducks questions from acquaintances about her background, opting for safety in silence.

Most costly is her and her husband’s ineligibility for state-subsidized housing through his job at a local factory, which gives precedence to married couples who are both permanent Beijing residents. Han Yinxing is officially considered a single man in the housing pool and so has no priority on the list.

The Hans rent a small, concrete-floored two-room flat for 500 yuan (about $60) per month, an amount that consumes half--and sometimes all--of the husband’s fluctuating salary. Their neighbors are other workers at the factory, whom Han sometimes eyes enviously because their apartments are basically paid for by the state.

“If I could save 6,000 yuan a year, I wouldn’t have to live such a straitened life,” she said with a sigh. “I could buy things for my daughter, entertain my friends. You can do a lot with 6,000 yuan.”

Including receive medical treatment. Since giving birth, Han has been in poor health, with an infection that swells her arms and legs. Some days she can barely face the five flights of stairs to her apartment.

“I really want to work and earn some money, but I can’t. If I work one day, I have to rest in bed for two. The doctor wants me to go to the hospital for treatment,” she said, “but it’s too expensive.”

At most, she pulls in a few hundred yuan a month selling gaily colored purses patched together on a home sewing machine that looks like an antique to Western eyes.

But Han’s situation seems almost luxurious to Guo Shuping. Guo, 29, her husband and their daughter live in a single room that a tall man can cross from side to side in four strides.

Like Han Chun, Guo comes from outside Beijing, while her husband, Lan Lizhong, is a Beijing native. They, too, do not qualify for state housing.

What worries them most is how they will educate their 4-year-old daughter. Nonresidents must fork over extra fees to enroll their children in local schools--if they can afford it and if there is room.

“We’ll have to pay an extra 600 yuan per term,” Guo said anxiously. Their household income averages between 500 and 1,000 yuan a month. “If I had a hukou, we wouldn’t have to pay it.”

Under guidelines issued three years ago by the central government, children 5 and over are theoretically entitled to acquire an urban residence permit if at least one of their parents has one. But local authorities in Beijing, who jealously guard their residents’ privileges, have resisted liberalizing their policies in accordance with the guidelines.

“The government has already been under heavy pressure to solve problems created by the current population [situation]. Transportation, housing and especially education are major problems for the Beijing government to contend with while formulating hukou policies,” said Zeng Xiangquan, dean of the School for Labor Relations and Human Resources at People’s University in Beijing.

Zeng said he cannot predict when the Chinese capital will relax its laws; others say it will do so only when forced, or will do it in such a way as to accept only the highly skilled--not simple laborers or the unregistered spouses of Beijing residents.

The danger is that the line between the haves and have-nots in Beijing, between the lucky caste of legal residents and those scorned as outsiders, will harden further, breeding resentment in a city scrambling to look its best for the Summer Olympics in 2008.

“It takes time to reform the system,” Zeng said. “But it certainly ought to be reformed.”