China to resolve hukou issue for 100 million rural migrants

english.gov.cn 2016-10-11

The State Council has released a circular to urge rolling out plans to grant hukou to rural migrants living in urban areas with steady jobs.

According to the circular, the urbanization rate of household registered population will rise an average of 1 percent each year, or more than 13 million people, during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-2020).

By 2020, urbanization rate should reach 45 percent, a 2 percent drop from 2013 in the difference between urbanization rates of registered population with hukou and permanent residents.

Except for a few megacities, restrictions on urban hukou should be eased for rural migrants, especially if they are moving to cities through education or military service, living in cities for over five years or with their families, and for the new generation of rural migrant workers.

For large and super cities, different hukou policies should be created for downtown areas, suburbs, and new districts according to occupation, residence, participation in social security, and years stayed.

Medium and large cities should not set barriers on hukou for house purchasing, investment, or tax payment. Meanwhile, cities with a downtown permanent population below 3 million should not implement the credit-based hukou system.

The circular also called for more efforts to provide financial support for rural migrants’ urbanization. For cities absorbing more rural migrants, the central budget will provide support in infrastructure and affordable housing.

Meanwhile, land usage of urban construction will be linked with urbanization of rural migrants to accommodate new residents.

The circular also urged improving financing for urban infrastructure construction, with work done to enhance information disclosure, rating, and issuing management of bonds, standardize debt financing of local governments, and promote cooperation between governments and social capital in urban public service and infrastructure building.

A system safeguarding rural migrants’ rights to land contracts, the use of homestead, and gaining collective earnings in hometowns should be established, but requiring them to transfer these rights when they get urban hukou would not be allowed.

In addition, a compensation mechanism should be set up for migrants who give up those rights, helping them transfer the rights legally.

Rural people who receive urban hukou should be included in the urban housing security system and basic medical insurance network. They are expected to join the urban pension insurance, and their descendants should have equal educational rights as their urban classmates.

The residential permit system should cover all urban permanent residents without hukou, and the gap between them and household registered residents in basic public services should be narrowed, according to the circular.

It also urged developing national statistical indicators that reflect the urbanization rate of the permanent population and household registered population, respectively.

Household registration of people who have no local registered residence, especially rural migrants, should be tracked and supervised. Government will carry out a mid-term evaluation for the registration in 2018, and create a summary assessment in 2020.

As the State Council has clarified related policies in official documents, related departments should step up their work and issue specific measures by the end of 2016, said the document.