Press briefing on household registration reform

CCTV:

Reform of the household registration system is an issue of great concern to society. The previous speakers talked about the objectives and the corresponding specific measures. My question now is: in order to achieve these objectives, what challenges can we anticipate, and how will you solve them? Thank you.

Huang Ming:

Thank you for your question. The reform of the household registration system certainly involves many challenges, being a systematic and complicated undertaking affecting many other fields.

The first challenge is China's large population, which has created gaps in development between urban and rural areas, different regions and large and small cities. The same challenge also applies to balancing the aspects that led to these gaps.

Second, there are welfare policies attached to the household registration system for a long time, and these are difficult to detach. Reforming the household registration system would have been fairly easy but for these various welfare undertakings and benefits.

Third, different groups will raise different demands that naturally create difficulties in coordinating the reform. As a reporter just mentioned in regard to megacities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, we are aware that many people elsewhere stubbornly seek to get the same level of benefits as residents of those areas and it's difficult to meet their demand.

Such issues have show that the reform of the household registration system is a difficult, complicated, and long-term undertaking. The smooth progress of reform requires us to carefully implement the four principles stipulated in the "Opinion."

We should assume a proactive yet prudent attitude in our work to ensure everything is conducted in an orderly way. That means we have to be cautious in prioritizing the use of current benefits and rational in unveiling additional ones. We also must properly guide public expectations in regard to our capacity to bear the load, to prevent unrealistic pursuit and reckless advancement.

We should adhere to the people-oriented principle and respect the wishes of the general public. For example, as we often say, we should let rural residents decide whether they want to move into cities. If they do, it is also their decision on when to make the move and in which city they choose. We should refrain from aggressive measures such as "forcing" rural residents to move or forcing them to accept urban household registration.

We should conduct our work according to different local conditions and understand these differences. In other words, there can be no universal method in implementing national policies to settle rural residents in cities.

We don't impose top-down quotas, thus leaving room for maneuver by local authorities. To sum up, we should continue to expand public services covering both people with local household residence permits and those who are yet to settle down in the city.

Thank you.