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本帖最后由 woikuraki 于 2012-3-31 11:22 编辑
【中文标题】中国的户口之痛
【原文标题】China May Finally Let Its People Move More Freely
【登载媒体】商业周刊
【原文作者】Dexter Roberts
【原文链接】http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-15/china-may-finally-let-its-people-move-more-freely#p1
数亿人是中国大城市中的二等公民，他们没有社会福利，对工作所在地没有感情。这让他们郁郁寡欢、克制消费、生产率低下。
这个现象的罪魁祸首就是中国的户籍制度，也就是户口。这个小小的红册子记录了每一个家庭的重要信息，包括婚姻、离异、出生、死亡，以及每个人所隶属的城市或村庄。与户口紧密相连的是各项福利，包括医疗保障、养老金、子女的免费教育。只有当中国居民居住在户籍所在地的时候，他们才能享用这些福利。如果一个人没有居住地的户口，那么将面临各种困难，比如申请驾驶执照、购买房屋，甚至购买汽车。
当中国努力创造一个平衡的经济环境时，政策制定者们意识到户口制度已经成为了一个累赘。上个月末，中央政治局宣布了一些计划，让农村流动人口更容易获取城市户口。3月5日，温家宝总理在人民代表大会上发言说，在中国逐步放宽限制条件之后，农民工将“有序地成为城市永久居民”。中国的改革刊物《新世纪周刊》总编胡舒立在3月8日写道：“在今天的中国，户口制度在道德上越来越站不住脚。作为经济增长和城市化的绊脚石，这项制度到了该全面调整的时候了。”这并不是说户口制度会立即被废除，当局担心这会引发全国的流动人口涌向大城市，并引发不安定因素。对新城市居民提供社会福利保障也需要高额的成本。
尽管中国的家庭登记制度已经延续了几百年，但户口制度开始于1958年，沿袭了苏联的国内护照制度。户口让农民在土地上动弹不得，为工业化进程生产廉价的食物。在经济开放之后，它允许大规模劳动力从乡村进入城市企业和出口加工厂。前提条件是，工人的户籍不迁入城市，也没有权力享受医疗福利和免费教育。
户口制度可以解释一些不正常的经济现象：个人消费从2000年占GDP比重46％降到2010年的33％。香港丰环球学员的经济学家Louis Kuijs指出，在城市人口不断膨胀的背景下，这与经济学家们的预测大相径庭。
华盛顿大学教授Kam Wing Chan预测，尽管去年中国的城镇人口达6.9亿，但其中2亿以上人口没有城市户口。这些流动工人远离家人，无法享受政府的福利政策，经常居住在公司宿舍和廉价的房屋中，他们看不到未来，害怕失业和工伤。为了应对这些不确定因素，他们只能遏制消费，努力储蓄，并且从不成家，而家庭是中产阶级的支柱。Kuijs说：“户口制度支撑了整个城市化进程，这是最有效刺激消费的方法执意。”华盛顿大学的Chan说，由于户口制度的延续，“说中国的城市化将产生大量的中产阶级观点，被证明是不准确的”。
邓宗伟的困境是这个问题的缩影。这位灯光师在珠江三角洲的东莞市有一份不错的工作，但他在去年7月不得不把妻子和5岁的儿子送回老家湖南永州，他自己每个月都要乘坐10个小时的汽车回家。如果家人和他一起留在东莞，他们就必须要支付东莞公立学校的学费。他说：“这里的学费每年12000人民币（1900美元），在湖南，我们一分钱都不用付。”他还说他的妻子不得不辞职照顾孩子，“这是中国所有流动工人的大问题，我们为此痛苦不堪。”
北京和上海的国有企业每年都会得到数千个户口配额，让它们可以招聘到来自内地的优秀员工。毫无疑问，有些户口最终流入黑市。在北京，一名大学毕业生可以在黑市中买到来自大型国有企业的户口。中国劳动关系学员教授王侃说，价格高达15万元人民币。在互联网的聊天室里，很多人在兜售户口，有些尽管交易方式非法，但的确是真户口，有些则是假的。最近，一位北京大学毕业生花7万元人民币购买了一个国有食品加工企业的户口，为了能留在首都就业。一个有钱的即将毕业的学生花10万元人民币购买了一个户口，以便更容易在北京购买房产。这两个人都拒绝透露详情，在黑市购买户口是一个敏感话题。
户口制度让Ben Schwall的生意越来越难做，他是东莞一家物流公司的创始人。包括工程师邓在内的很多员工要请假把学龄子女送回老家，还有人要请假回家盖房子。他说：“在东莞，在我的公司里，户口问题越来越严重了。”
一项改革措施是，给那些符合条件的流动人口授予城市户口。自2010年年中以来，在沿海省份广东，流动人口需要挣到60分，就有资格获得东莞、深圳、惠州和中山等城市的户口。教育、技能、当地工作年限，甚至像献血这样的善举都是要考量的因素。邓先生说他对此不感兴趣，他希望在老家退休，如果拿到城市户口，这个计划就泡汤了。他问道：“中国政府为什么不干脆放弃这个让我们的生活如此混乱不堪的户口制度呢？”
政府还尝试过其它改革措施：向高校里的精英学生奖励户口，或者把户口给予愿意为当地经济投资的富翁。重庆和成都周边地区的农民，如果愿意放弃土地就可以得到城市户口，享受城市福利。重庆期望到2020年，把1000万人转化为城市身份。
由于独生子女政策，中国在面临严峻的用工荒。北京GK Dragonomics的中国研究专家Andrew Batson说：“经济学冷冰冰的逻辑就是，你必须要保持劳动力的流动性，这样你才可以尽可能有效地利用中国的人力资源。也就是说要打破阻碍人们在需要劳动力的地方踏实工作和生活的障碍。”
目前，户口改革还仅限于小城市。渣打银行上海经济学家Stephen Green说，基础设施的承载量和安全问题让大城市还无法放宽户口政策。祁艳红在广州一家珠宝加工厂工作，她10岁的儿子和祖父母住在距此10小时车程的老家，她说：“我们其实没的选择，只是随着中国朝令夕改的官方政策四处漂泊，这就是中国工人的真实状态。”
原文：
Hundreds of millions of Chinese live in China’s biggest cities as second-class citizens, with no access to social benefits and limited ties to the locales in which they work. Their situation leads to unhappiness, lower consumption, and lost productivity.
The culprit: China’s household registration—or hukou—system. The hukou, a small red passbook, contains key information on every family, including marriages, divorces, births, and deaths, as well as the city or village to which each person belongs. What comes attached to the hukou are benefits including health care, a pension, and free education for one’s children. These benefits are only available if a Chinese citizen lives where he or she is registered. Not having a hukou for where one lives makes it more difficult to get a driver’s license, buy a house, or purchase a car.
As China strives for a more balanced economy, top policy-makers are realizing that the hukou system is a liability. Late last month, China’s cabinet announced plans to make it easier for rural migrants to obtain a city hukou (pronounced hoo-ko). On March 5, Premier Wen Jiabao told the National People’s Congress that migrant workers will become “permanent urban residents in an orderly manner” as China eases restrictions. “The hukou system is morally indefensible in today’s China. It’s also due for an overhaul because the system impedes economic growth and urbanization,” wrote Hu Shuli, editor-in-chief of China’s reformist Caixin Century Magazine, on March 8. This doesn’t mean the hukou system will be swiftly dismantled: Authorities fear that would trigger a nationwide flood of migrants into the biggest cities and raise the prospect of mass unrest. Providing social welfare benefits to new urban residents will also be costly.
Although Chinese family registries have been around for centuries, today’s hukou system began in 1958 as a version of the Soviet Union’s internal passport regime. The hukou forced farmers to stay put and produce cheap food to sustain industrialization. With the economic opening, it evolved to allow massive migration from the country to urban enterprises and export factories. The qualifier: A worker’s residency did not transfer to the city. Neither did his right to health benefits and free education.
The hukou system helps explain an economic anomaly; private consumption’s contribution to gross domestic product dropped from 46 percent in 2000 to 33 percent in 2010. That’s the reverse of what economists would expect with an ever-bigger urban population, points out Louis Kuijs, an economist at the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong.
While China had a city population of 690 million last year, more than 200 million lack an urban hukou, estimates Kam Wing Chan, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Separated from their families, unable to tap into the urban network of government benefits, often living in company dorms or cheap housing, these migrant workers don’t know what the future holds and fear the outcome of a crippling work accident or lost job. In reaction to all this uncertainty, they save instead of spend and never form the solid urban households that are the backbone of any middle class. “The hukou system is holding up full urbanization, one of the most obvious ways to achieve more consumption,” says Kuijs. Because of the persistence of the hukou system, says Washington’s Chan, “the assumption that China’s urbanization will create a very large middle class is proving not accurate.”
The plight of Deng Zongwei illustrates the problem. A lighting engineer with a good job in Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta, he had to move his wife and 5-year-old son back to his hometown of Yongzhou, Hunan, last July, and has been taking the 10-hour-long bus ride home every month. If his family had stayed with him, they would have had to pay for public school in Dongguan. “School here would have cost ¥12,000 ($1,900) a year. In Hunan, it doesn’t cost us a penny,” he says, adding that his wife had to quit her job to live with their son. “This is a huge problem for all migrant workers in China. It makes our lives painful and difficult.”
State-owned enterprises in Beijing and Shanghai are allotted thousands of new hukou every year to make it easier for them to hire promising job candidates from the hinterlands. Inevitably, some of these allocated hukou end up on the black market. In Beijing, a university graduate can purchase a hukou that originated with a big SOE but ended up in the hands of a black market dealer. The price: up to ¥150,000, says Wang Kan, a professor at the China Institute of Industrial Relations in Beijing. On Internet chat sites, brokers offer hukous for sale; some are legitimate albeit sold illegally, while others are fakes, says Wang. One recent graduate from a Beijing university purchased a hukou for ¥70,000 from a state-run food processing company to stay in the capital. A wealthier student about to graduate from another university paid ¥100,000 for a hukou to make it easier to buy Beijing real estate. Both declined to speak for this story, citing the sensitivity of dealing in the illegal trade.
The hukou system makes business difficult for Ben Schwall, founder of a Dongguan-based supply logistics company. Many of his employees, including engineer Deng, take time off to move their school-age children back to their hometowns, says Schwall. Others want leave to oversee construction of homes in their native villages. “Hukou problems are crescendoing in Dongguan and right here in my office,” he says.
One reform of the system would award urban hukou to those migrants deemed worthy. Since mid-2010 in the coastal province of Guangdong, migrants have vied to earn the 60 points necessary to qualify for a hukou in the cities of Dongguan, Shenzhen, Huizhou, and Zhongshan. Education and skills, years of work in the city, and even good deeds like giving blood are taken into consideration. Engineer Deng says he isn’t interested: He may decide to retire in his hometown, an option he would lose if he gets an urban hukou. “Why doesn’t the Chinese government drop this hukou policy so our lives are not so complicated?” he asks.
Other reforms now being tried: awarding hukou to a tiny elite of university grads at the top of their classes or to superwealthy Chinese who also invest in a city’s economy. Chongqing and Chengdu are now offering urban hukou to nearby farmers willing to give up their land in return for urban benefits. Chongqing hopes to convert 10 million people to urban status by 2020.
In part because of the one-child policy, China is facing severe labor shortages. “There is a cold economic logic—you want to have mobility of labor so that you can use the enormous pool of human resources China has as efficiently as possible,” says Andrew Batson, China research director for GK Dragonomics in Beijing. “That means breaking down barriers so people can move more easily and work and live where the demand is.”
Hukou reform will focus for now on the smaller cities. Strains on municipal infrastructure as well as security problems have delayed liberalization in the biggest cities, says Stephen Green, Shanghai-based China economist at Standard Chartered Bank. Adds Qi Yanhong, who works in a jewelry factory in Guangzhou while her son lives with her in-laws some 10 hours away: “We have no real choices—we are subject to the whims of China’s official policy. That is the reality for China’s workers.”
The bottom line: The hukou system has marooned over 200 million workers in cities without access to social benefits. China is considering changes to it.
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狗仔卡
发表于 2012-3-26 09:50
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发表于 2012-3-26 15:52
