Greater social fairness

China's household registration system, or hukou, has long separated urban and rural citizens in a discriminative manner. Public voices criticizing this traditional dual system and calling for it to be abolished have been much heard in the past decades. The groundbreaking reform is ready to put this hukou duality to an end.

rmzxb.com.cn, July 30

Reform of the household registration system has to respect the will of citizens. Where and when to be a city dweller should be up to people themselves, instead of being pulled into an urban net. Hard as the reform might be, the government is obliged to implement it by all means and promote fairer policies to make the discriminatory hukou system obsolete.

zgswcn.com, July 30

Undeniably, household registration reform in China will require a large amount of money to proceed, but its economic dividends surely will be worth the input. In many other countries, the urbanization of rural residents has proved to be a major boost for a city's economic potential. Thus the reform could serve as a beginning for the free migration of Chinese residents, leading to readjustments of the current economic development, social progress and environment like many previous human migrations in China have done in the past.

China Youth Daily, July 30

Fundamentally, the current household registration system in China has been serving to consolidate the social injustice caused by imbalanced public services, rather than regulating the permanent resident population of a place as it was designed to do. Such outdated regulations have to change. To achieve the free migration of the Chinese people and the new market-oriented urbanization, various governments should separate the attached special interests from the hukou system, and make it focus on the regulation of permanent resident populations.

Nanfang Daily, July 30