Also, until recently, renting conferred no social benefits that buying did; the most important being placement in a local public school. Guangzhou is piloting giving renters more social benefits, other cities are supposed to follow, but this is super recent.
Such claim is highly misleading at best. Think about those millions of migrant workers in Shenzhen and their children, did they go to some kind of public schools in the last 3 decades? did they all go to private ones or stay uneducated? surely they went to public schools dedicated to them.
They now demand _better_ education and access to _better_ public schools, which is totally fine. However, the real problem here is how many of them are paying tax/social security contribution when compared to the rest of the population? e.g. how many people actually believe that those construction workers building skyscrapers in Shenzhen actually pay a fair amount of tax/social security contribution?
Guangzhou is piloting a new level of PC without addressing any real issue.
Wow, I don't think you are Chinese because you really don't know much about hukou, of which the rent issue isn't even getting near. First answer: mostly no. Second answer: most of them stayed home with grand parents (see China's left behind children problem). Third answer: there were cheap private schools dedicated to migrant worker kids, but the cities (like Beijing) shut them down saying they would try to take them in public schools, a promise that is never kept.
As a foreigner higher paid "migrant worker", we are not garaunteed access to public Chinese schools even if we pay taxes. We have to use private international schools for our kids instead. Public is just not an option. For my Chinese colleagues at work who lack hukou, ditto, though they can try to negotiate their way in to varying degrees of payment and success.
Guangzhou is doing a couple of things: those with skilled worker permits who are paying tax can get schooling for their kids even if they don't have hukou, a novel thing in china. And you can get priority access to a school in the local area just by renting an apartment.
Those construction workers do pay social tax contributions, and no, they aren't treated fairly at all because of their rural hukou. The GZ policy isn't even really aimed at people like them, it is rather aimed at people like us who make much more money. See:
(Using very recent Chinese sources). They specifically require a "highly skilled worker certificate in lieu of hukou". So as usual china doesn't care about poor migrant workers, they have to leave their kids behind.
My hukou is registered to the Jing'an district in Shanghai and I have been in the "system" for decades. ;)
You basically got misled by what you was told. To just name one simple example - rural hukou is better because every single one of those households was recently given land for FREE. CCP confirmed a few years back that the land given to those families back in the 70s/80s will permanently stay under the name of the current owning family without any further tax/levy. Next time when someone complains about the unfair rural hukou treatment, please don't forget to ask them how much land was given to them for free. Those living in the cities (e.g. me) never ever got that stuff. I'd happily trade my non-rural hukou for a rural one to get my fair share of those free rural land.
Be prepared when they explain to you about nonsense stuff like "oh, land is owned by the country, we were just given permanent right to use the land tax free".
> To just name one simple example - rural hukou is better because every single one of those households was recently given land for FREE.
I know that, and I also know that it gives kids access to substandard education in toufu schools along with requiring higher gaokao scores to get into urban universities, the only ones in China that don't suck. Many of these kids are left at home with their grandparents because their parents have gone off to the cities to work. They maybe see their parents once a year during Chinese New Years.
> Next time when someone complains about the unfair rural hukou treatment, please don't forget to ask them how much land was given to them for free.
Nor can they ever sell this land and move to the cities unless the government explicitly compensates them for confiscation. They can't even use the land as collateral for a bank loan to upgrade their farming infrastructure. They would basically be treated as serfs if they didn't become migrant workers in the cities.
> I'd happily trade my non-rural hukou for a rural one to get my fair share of those free rural land.
You have Shanghai hukou and you'd trade it in for rural hukou just for a few acres of land that you have to farm and can't sell? I'm not sure if you are being serious here, I'm tempted to post it on WeChat for laughs.
> Be prepared when they explain to you about nonsense stuff like "oh, land is owned by the country, we were just given permanent right to use the land tax free".
> along with requiring higher gaokao scores to get into urban universities
Students from the same province, rural or urban, subject to the same standard. the real gap is between different provinces, e.g. urban students from province X living a modem fancy city life can still be at disadvantage compared to students from the rural part of Beijing living their boring village life.
Note that the gap between different provinces have been there for hundreds of years[1].
> Nor can they ever sell this land and move to the cities unless the government explicitly compensates them for confiscation. They can't even use the land as collateral for a bank loan to upgrade their farming infrastructure. They would basically be treated as serfs if they didn't become migrant workers in the cities.
Serfs? You mean they were given the land for free and they are allowed/encouraged to rent out the land to generate an income, this is now the new definition of serfs? Maybe the government who gave them the land should issue an apology and compensation to all those received such free land?
