Beijing to Adjust Policies on Hukou to Limit the Exploding Population

The Beijing municipal government is about to adjust its policies on "hukou," or residential registration system, to limit the exploding population in the Chinese capital.

But as Zhao Jianfu reports, some experts doubt whether the planning adjustments alone will effectively ease the mounting population pressure.

Chen Xiaoxi, an overseas college graduate who was born and grew up outside Beijing, is looking for a job in the city.

"It's said that overseas students can enjoy favorable conditions if they are employed in the city to get a Beijing hukou. So I'm inclined to find a job that can provide me with a Beijing hukou."

But it's about to get much tougher for talents like Chen to get a Beijing hukou. Authorities in the Chinese capital is planning to issue residential permits to professionals whose skills its enterprises need most.

And only workers with steady jobs and employed migrant laborers will be able to get residential ID cards, which makes it easier for them to buy apartments and cars as well as benefit from the city's education, medical and social welfare systems.

The new policy aims to control Beijing's rapidly growing population by limiting the number of registered residents.

But Zhang Yi, a demographic researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, questions whether the policy will produce the expected result.

Zhang says limiting the number of residential permits will only prevent the number of permanent residents in Beijing from growing and have little effect on the transient population, a major source of the capital's inhabitants.

"The country is undergoing rapid urbanization. Along with this process, it is estimated that about 200 million people in rural areas will come to more developed cities like Beijing. Also, the aging problem is becoming more serious in Beijing, which means a large number of laborers are needed."

Statistics indicate that Beijing's transient population has exceeded 10 million and accounts for about 70 percent of the city's overall population. And the number continues to increase rapidly.

Yu Taofang is an urban planning professor at Tsinghua University. He believes that to decrease the number of transient inhabitants, officials must improve the land use rate by upgrading the city's level of industrial development.

"Like in the old town area or the city center, there are many small businesses and restaurants, mainly in the service industry. And this industry attracts many transient workers but has low efficiency in terms of land use compared to the financial industry or other higher industries."

Besides the city's downtown area, Yu notes that the suburbs are crammed with transient workers who have jobs in the service industry.

Yu says that while the service industry is an essential part of the entire industrial chain, he believes the city government must increase its entry standards for small businesses to control the number of transient workers.

Besides Beijing's low industrial level which attracts a large number of unskilled transient workers, Duan Chenrong, a professor on larithmics at Renmin University, says the exploding number of inhabitants here is a result of the unbalanced regional and national economic development.

"For years we have seen that the importance of population control has been neglected when the government is planning to upgrade the industrial level or enlarge the industrial scale. Also, if we want to develop every industry to the highest level, we definitely need a large number of human laborers, both highly skilled and ones with lower-level skills."

Duan Chengrong suggests that Beijing officials should have a clear development focus for specific industries and share resources from other industries with neighboring areas to promote balanced regional development.

For CRI, I'm Zhao Jianfu.