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ID Card Instead of Residence Booklet--A reform giving country folk equal treatment
The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region has lately carried out a reform in which a time-worn residence booklet registration system was replaced by ID card registration, a step taken to ensure free population flow from country to town and step up urbanization all over Guangxi.
An agricultural and non-agricultural population as a two-track population system has been a thing left over from the days of planned economy, and as a residence management system introduced it had lessened the pressure of population flows back in the days under a backward economy in China. But practiced over half a century of time, its harm has been building up.
Known to human history hundred years ago was the famous saying "All human beings were born equal". As has been written into the PRC Constitution there is also the clause that "All citizens of the People's Republic of China are equal before the law". However, the two-track residence management system has brought about new inequalities between town and country and between rural people and townsfolk in China and these are as shown by differences in the issuance and amount of old-age pension, medical treatment and other social welfare. A ready example is that in the accident of Hongqiao Bridge collapsing in Chongqing last January, which claimed 40 lives, relatives of victims from rural areas received a compensation amount only half that of compensations to those of urban.
There is no need to say about the lingering influence the two-track residence system has had on people in China, leaving numerous country folk thinking they are inferior to townspeople in personality, value and dignity. Meanwhile, urban residents set themselves wide apart as "superior urbanites" to their "inferior" rural counterparts. Not long ago, an old lady riding on a bus in Beijing administered three young farmers such an admonition: "Why you country folk bungled into cities instead of keeping on your land to farm at home?" According to this old lady, it's natural for the farmers to till on their land back at home and cities are merely the designated grounds of urban people. Country folk emigrated into cities have to be linked up with social crimes and harms that had been give rise to, and every city dweller has the "responsibility" and "right" to enlighten them in this regard.
A market economy should provide equal social opportunities for every member in a society. But cities seem to have long been privileged places serving only the urban people and country folk have to keep to and live in rural areas of "their own". More often than not they are given the hardest labor and the lowest pay. They are entitled merely to "temporary residence" and have to be "home" before the Spring Festival and back on jobs according to their lot. They are forced to pay extra "admission" fees if they want their children to receive the same education as that of their townsfolk.
The "peasant problem" has been long a major problem pestering China, which can only be solved by giving equal treatment to legions of the country's farmers. Abolishing the two-track residence system is only part of the stupendous work projected toward that goal by China.
By PD Online staff member Li Heng
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