© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economic stimulus plan, NPC 2010, social security, social unrest
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For decades, China has restrained migration by linking access to low-cost public services like health care and education to a person’s registered place of residence. The system means rural migrants in Shanghai, Beijing and other big cities are deprived many essential benefits and services.

Han Jun, a senior research fellow at the Development Research Center, a think tank that advises China’s Cabinet, said a policy paper released last month made it clear that the government is “striving for substantial reform of the household registration system” to allow migrants, especially younger ones, to register in cities.

However, the reform plan aims to get migrants registered in cities and townships close to their home villages – not expensive places like Beijing or Shanghai where migrants flock for construction and service sector jobs.

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Post tags: hukou, migrant workers, social security
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A draft to reform the social security scheme in allowing Chinese migrant workers to transfer their pension accounts and contributions nationwide has been finalized, sources revealed to the Economic Observer.

China has some 200 million rural farmers turned migrant workers, who move from city to city or province to province in search of jobs; but the current social security scheme forbids cross-province transfers of accounts.

As a result, migrant workers have to close their old accounts, withdraw their contributions and open new ones whenever they moved bases. In the process, they would lose part of their savings, as the higher contributions made by their previous employers would remain with respective local governments.

The EO learned that the reform draft, which aimed to resolve the above problem and better protect the workers’ right, would be made public early next year.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: migrant workers, pensions, social security
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Next year the country will mark its 60th birthday as a people’s republic (in Confucian tradition, 60th birthdays are particularly significant). Reform and opening has thus taken up half of China’s communist life. But officials are being careful to manage expectations of further change. Deng once suggested that direct elections to national leadership posts could be held by 2050. No one mentions that now. On the economic side huge challenges loom, among them an ageing population and a blighted environment, both of which could drag down growth.

Deng, who died in 1997, is often described as the chief architect of reform, as if the sweeping changes of the past 30 years were mapped out by him. He himself more accurately described his approach as “crossing a river by feeling the stones”. The ultimate objective has never been clear. Since 1992 it has been to set up a “socialist market economy”, but officials struggle to explain how this differs from a real one. Deng announced that year that the party’s “basic line” (party-speak for reform and opening under one-party rule) would not change for 100 years. This implies a lot more stone-groping.

Reuters looks at how the struggle to redefine the Marxist economy plays out in Beijing’s hutongs:

There, migrants from northern China, seeking their fortune in the big city, live side-by-side with workers from bankrupt firms who can no longer count on the cradle-to-grave security that was a bedrock of the socialist system.

Creating a new social safety net for millions of workers cast adrift in the past 15 years has emerged as a key challenge for the Communist Party — especially given the global economic downturn could create waves of more unemployed.

The government has only slowly begun building a modern welfare state despite three decades of rapid growth that has made China the world’s fourth-largest economy.

An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, calls on China to continue full-steam ahead with capitalist reforms despite recent setbacks with the global financial crisis:

The danger is that Beijing is extracting the wrong lesson from recent events at home and abroad. Reformers have won many battles in recent years, but not quite the intellectual war yet. Now a growing number of policy makers seem wary of further economic reforms. Emboldened by the current global financial crisis, anti-free-market critics have grown increasingly boisterous. Some pundits in China have gleefully declared the beginning of the decline of U.S.-led free market capitalism. These critics attribute the global financial crisis mainly to the failure of laissez-faire philosophies, and note Western governments’ nationalization of well-known financial institutions.

This debate could have serious policy consequences.

On the political front, hundreds of citizens have called for political and legal reforms in a significant document called Charter 08. China Media Project also translates an interview with liberal party scholar Yu Keping, in which he argues that the fight against corruption should be a major component of the political reform process.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 30 years of reform, economic reform, PRC history, social security, welfare
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Beijing is considering transferring shares from state-owned companies to the national pension fund to help fill a gaping shortfall, the fund’s new head told the Financial Times on Friday.

Dai Xianglong , chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund , said the government, individuals and companies all had to increase contributions if the $70bn fund was to meet the pension commitments to the country’s ageing workforce.

“In the future it is possible for a portion of domestic public state-owned shares to be transferred to the NCSSF,” said Mr Dai, a former central bank governor, in an interview.

© Kate Zhao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: pension fund, social security
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Fines imposed on Chinese who violate the country’s one-child-only policy may be reduced for the poor, a top family planning official said Tuesday, as authorities stressed a broader approach to population management.

The announcement came a day after state media reported that many Chinese believe it is unfair that the wealthy can “buy” a second child by simply paying fines for breaking the one-child-only rule for most urban couples…

The announcement appeared to be part of a broader attempt by officials to put a more human face on China’s much-maligned family planning policies. As the most populous country on Earth — China has 1.3 billion people — the country is struggling with an aging population, a growing rich-poor gap, unemployment pressures and continued reports of family planning abuses, including forced abortions and sterilizations.
[Full Text]

Related AP report: “China Sticking to One-Child Policy” says, “China will not loosen its one-child policy, despite a top family planning official’s acknowledgment Tuesday that it was partly to blame for a worsening problem of too many boy babies and not enough girls in the world’s most populous nation.”

- Also Beijing Review magazine’s Family Planning Policy Not to Blame for Gender Imbalance

© Wu Nan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: one-child policy, population, social security, sustainable development
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ACCORDING to a State Department report released this week, American citizens adopted 6,493 children from China in 2006, a decline of 18 percent from the previous year’s total of 7,906. And yet, just over a month ago, this newspaper reported that China had prepared strict new criteria for foreign adoption applications because the country claimed it lacked “available” babies to meet the “spike” in demand.

China has always limited foreign adoptions, and it does not publish reliable statistics on the number of children in its orphanages. So how is one to know whether the decrease in adoptions reflects a lack of supply or a lack of demand?

…According to a February 2005 report in The Weekend Standard, a Chinese business newspaper, demographers in China found a ratio of 117 boys per 100 girls under the age of 5 in the 2000 census. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, put into effect in 1979 in order to curb population growth, and a strong cultural preference for male children, this gender gap could result in as many as 60 million “missing” girls from the population by the end of the decade, enough to alarm even Chinese officials. [Full Text]

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Post tags: adoption, children, one-child policy, population, social security
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China will be home to 300 million more men than women by 2020, state media said on Thursday, warning the gender imbalance, along with an aging population and rapid urbanization, could be destabilizing.

China has about 119 boys born for every 100 girls, an imbalance that has grown since it introduced a one-child policy more than 25 years ago to curb population growth — a restriction that bolstered a traditional preference for boys…

Already the combination of an aging population and single-child families mean that only-children face the prospect of looking after two parents and four grandparents, a potentially huge financial burden in the absence of a comprehensive pension system. [Full Text]

Read CDT’s post on the related issue of Aging.

(Photo of China’s propaganda poster on One Child Policy)

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Post tags: aging, one-child policy, population, social security
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The one-child policy combined with a large aging population means pensions are in danger of falling short. What’s the solution?

Time is running out for China’s pension system. The one-child policy has created the 1-2-4 phenomenon within many of the country’s households – one child, two parents and four grandparents. With the dependency ratio doubling by the generation, China’s working-age population is expected to peak in 2010 and by 2040 there will be two workers for every one retiree, down from six to one in 2000.

Based on current progress, there won’t be enough money in public or private pensions to support the elderly – and that’s discounting the rural population uncovered by the state system. Working with institutions such as the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Asian Development Bank, Stirling Finance chairman Stuart Leckie has run a number of projects looking at the holes, and potential plugs, in China’s pension system. He told China Economic Review how the present state of affairs came about and where the road may lead from here.[Full Text]

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© Mo Ming for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: one-child policy, social security
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One of the world’s oldest nations is getting older. China’s population of 1.3 billion is graying rapidly and the country, which now has about 146 million senior citizens, will have almost 290 million by 2025 — nearly the entire population of the United States — according to a study released last month by China’s State Council.

With the number of people 60 and over increasing by 6 million a year and few social welfare programs, the fate of China’s aged is uncertain. In areas such as central Chongqing and Sichuan provinces, where aging levels exceed the national average, the lack of government support for the elderly is clearly felt.

“We have nothing to do, and we sit around all day playing mah-jongg,” said Dai Yong Fa, a senior in You Liang village in Chongqing, as she gestured to the tables of retirees along the main street of her village. “We get nothing from the government, and we have nothing — even our kids are away in the cities working.”[Full Text]

© Mo Ming for China Digital Times (CDT), 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: senior citizens, social security
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