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| Cathrine Mountain |
By Cathrine Mountain, Class of 2015
After attending a lecture given by the current Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, I left feeling slightly overwhelmed with the amount of information he presented to us concerning US-Sino current relations. Huntsman focused heavily on describing the kind of growth that China is experiencing in terms of population, economic status, and prominence on the world stage. While a lot of issues were brought up and briefly discussed, I was particularly interested in his discussion of the ways in which China is handling its rapidly increasing population. With increased urbanization, not only does the government have to handle issues related to overcrowding and pollution, but they must also begin to revise the Hukou system which has existed in various forms since as early as the Qing Dynasty. Since 1958, the Chinese government has used this system to control the immigration of rural workers into the cities, in order to ensure cities did not become overpopulated. Recently, however, the system has served as a mechanism to keep rural citizens from receiving decent pension, education, and healthcare.
According to An Baijie of China Daily, the Ministry of Public Security along with eleven other government ministries and commissions has begun drafting reforms for the Hukou system. This revised system will still require the registration of all families to the Hukou system but it will not impede rural residents from receiving the benefits that are currently only enjoyed by citizens of urban origin. Huang Ming, the Vice-Minister of Public Security, said that the inequalities of the current Hukou system create a major barrier for the country's urbanization process. The new reforms expect to establish a new Hukou system by the year 2020, which will require some extensive planning and organization to accommodate the needs of citizens that have previously been disregarded. An Baijie explains that currently the system denies these benefits to citizens who come from rural communities, while their co-workers who come from urban communities have access to such benefits. The reforms for the Hukou system will address this issue by allowing citizens access to the benefits based upon their residence, not based upon where they were born. This will provide access to the aforementioned benefits to over 260 million migrant workers that are currently restricted because of their place of birth. It will be very interesting to see how these reforms, if passed, affect the already skyrocketing rate of urbanization in China.
Cathrine Mountain, of Frankfort, Ky., is a junior McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She is studying political science and anthropology.