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Feb. 17 – China’s State Council has announced that it will abolish the permanent residency requirement, or hukou, to allow job seekers to move easily between cities and alleviate unemployment.
The regulation is applicable to all cities in the country except Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing.
Small labor-intensive enterprises can also be qualified for as much as RMB2 million in loans should they employ the minimum amount of registered jobless urban residents.
“The Chinese job market is grim amid the global financial crisis and college graduates are facing huge pressure finding jobs,” according to a document submitted by the State Council.
The government has been regularly implementing new rules to contain the country’s worsening unemployment rate. According to report made by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, unemployment rate among new graduates surpassed 12 percent at the end of last year, and that 1.5 million were without work. This year, 6.1 million college graduates are expected to seek jobs, reports China Daily.
State-owned enterprises and scientific research institutions are also being encouraged to offer more jobs. Job seekers are now being advised to consider looking for jobs in grassroots communities, central and western parts of China or small and medium-sized enterprises, or even put up their own business.
The abolition of the Hukou has been repeatedly announced since around the year 2000, when it was said that by 2003 the Hukou system would be scrapped.
Over the years this issue has had a lot of lip service, but even this year, changes are hard to come by. For example, I wasn’t able to marry my wife anywhere in China except in her Hukou, so we had to travel from the extreme south of China to Inner Mongolia, just to spend 20 minutes in a government office to get marriage papers.