Hukou System and Discrimination against Rural Population in China
Ms. Wenzhuo HOU,
Visiting Fellow, Harvard Law School,
November 20, 2001

With first-hand experience at UNIFEM (UN Foundation for Women) and UNICEF (UN Children's Foundation) branches in Beijing at grassroots level, Ms. Wenzhou Hou is passionate about the lack of basic human rights of rural migrant workers in China. Establishing her own center, "Internal Migrant Workers Legal Aid and Research Center", an NGO in Beijing, she conducted various research projects on China's rural migrant workers and migrant-child labor.

In her talk, Ms. Hou first described one of her research projects. It is about the life conditions of flower girls in Beijing. Most of them are between 6 and 14 years old, and work almost exclusively at night from 9pm to 5am. They withdrew from elementary school in order to sell flowers in Beijing. Like other service industries occupied by migrant workers (migrants from Zhejiang province occupy the apparel making industry, young boys from Anhui province occupy the car-cleaning industry), most flower girls are from Hunan province. Visiting the families of some of these young girls in Hunan, Ms. Hou learned that this is partly because their parents see this as an opportunity to make financial return out of their young children, and because they think younger girls can make better sales than older girls and boys. Ms. Hou's conservative estimate of the number of such children is about one million, which is much higher than what the official statistics reveal.

Child labor, especially migrant workers' children, does not have legal protection or social status equal to city residents, but fine and interrogation by local police and officials. There have been communal efforts by migrant workers to set up informal schools for their children to be educated since they are not allowed to enter city public schools unless they pay sky-high fees. But these efforts are squashed by local officials whenever they are in the way of any major city construction. According to Ms. Hou, there is no government support or protection of these children, only government interference and fines. She thinks that this is an institutional problem, a system-wide problem.

She said that according to the International Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1965, what these migrants and their children experience is discrimination based on descent which has the effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social and cultural or any other field of public life. The hukou system is a structured, profound and comprehensive way to enforce this discrimination.

Through tabulating a dozen forms of unequal treatment to rural and migrant workers under the Hukou system, including education, employment and voting rights restrictions, Ms. Hou explained how the Hukou system has contributed to discrimination against rural residents and rural migrants in China. In the same table, she also compared these restrictions with those on the black population in South Africa under apartheid. She discussed in the end the system's