Hukou reform urgent, says official

Lu Tongjing (center), a second-generation migrant worker from Zhangjiakou, Hebei province, at a job fair in Beijing on Feb 27.[Jin Liangkuai/Xinhua]

New-generation migrant workers demanding the same education and welfare rights as city dwellers

SHANGHAI: New-generation migrant workers, better educated and more informed than their forebears, are now demanding that they receive the same treatment as the natives of their host cities.

Such demands have added great pressure to the central government to re-examine the household registration, or hukou, policy, which was designed to stop the flood of migrants from the rural regions to the cities.

Han Changfu, the newly-appointed minister of agriculture, wrote in the official People's Daily earlier this month that migrant workers born in the late 1980s and 1990s are beginning to develop a strong sense of equality and democracy in a more open society.

"They reject the rural-urban gap and demand equal treatment in employment, public services and political rights as city residents," Han said.

The issue is expected to be a hot topic at this year's "two sessions", which officially kick off on Wednesday.

In an article in Qiushi Journal, Zhou Yongkang, a Standing Committee member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, noted there is an "urgent" need to speed up the reform of the hukou system and to explore new models to manage the flow of the work force nationwide.

Many new-generation migrant workers said they are no different from their neighbors who have hukou in the city. The young people in the rural areas watch the same TV programs and chat with their peers on the Internet, said Dong Dengxin, director of Hubei provincial research center on small-and-medium-sized enterprises. "They are exposed to the same influences as their counterparts in the cities."

Discrimination an issue: survey: Even though an increasing number of new-generation migrant workers have started considering themselves white-collar workers, social discrimination against them still exists in cities, a survey has found.

Yang Cheng, a 26-year-old hair stylist at Siyu Hair Salon in Shanghai, is one example of a former migrant worker who made his way to the city. In 1999, he went to Shenzhen to work in a watch-making factory from his home village in Central China's Hubei province.

"I watched how people lived in the cities and I wanted to be one of them," he said.

After working at the factory for a few months, Yang decided to make his future elsewhere.

"I don't like toiling in the factory for a miserable salary of no more than 1,500 yuan ($220) a month," he said. "With that kind of income, I could only afford to share a room in a squalid apartment building with several other migrant workers. I didn't move all the way to Shenzhen for that."

With the support of his family and relatives, he raised 5,000 yuan to take a course in hair styling at a vocational school in Shenzhen. After graduation, he found a job in a local hair salon and later moved to Shanghai. He now earns an average of 5,000 yuan a month.

"I don't see myself as a migrant worker here because I now have a decent job," Yang said. "But it seems impossible for me to enjoy the same rights as other Shanghai people.

"As the second-best option, I bought an apartment back in Hubei and changed my hukou to an urban status there."

Similar to Yang, Zhang Dan, 23, from Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, quit her first job in Tianjin and paid 3,000 yuan to learn numerical-controlled machine tools in a training school.

"My last job did not require high skills and, hence, was not sustainable. I was just wasting my life," Zhang said.

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After graduation, she was soon promoted to supervisor of the quality control department of her company. Zhang said she wants to settle down in Tianjin and make a family with her boyfriend.

"I look forward to becoming part of the city," she said.

To many young migrant workers like Yang and Zhang, a job does not mean only money. According to a recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 71 percent of the respondents would like to learn a skill, have fun and enjoy modern life in the cities.

"These young workers are very picky about their jobs, especially those who have undergone training," a staff member of a Harbin human resources firm told local media. "They turn down jobs which do not require high skills, do not pay well or do not have a good working environment."

Han Jun, a researcher with the Development Research Center of the State Council, said this week that China now has 230 to 240 million migrant workers, half of whom are in the post-1980s generation.