The Empowerment Of The Social Rights: Two Models Of Local Governments Reform On Hukou System

Nowadays,in China many kinds of public services are still affiliated to Hukou System,which is considered as a symbol representing the gab of access to social welfare.It has been a key issue how to offer non-local residents,throughout the process of Hukou System reforming.Since the year 2005,with the central government instant impulse,many local governments have been conducting various policies to to offer social rights to non-local residents.However,apparent variety is noticed in special actions among local governments.While some of them intend to apply a pattern of“help free migration”,appearing as a combination of high entering requirements and narrow gap of social rights,on the condition of which non-local residents have nearly the same access to social rights,without local Hukou.The others intend to take a pattern of“help Hukou attainment”,appearing as a combination of low entering requirements and wide gap of social rights,which means to achieve local Hukou is the precondition of access of high leveled social services.In order to explore the origin of the variety mentioned above and logistics behind actions of local governments,the research is done with methodologies of case study and qualitative comparative analysis.Jiaxing and Huzhou,which share many similarities on level of economic development,geographic location and city scale,are chosen to be our cases to be compared.In comparison the fundamental characteristics and appearances are found.Furthermore,by the comparison the research tries to propose assumption which factors decisively contribute to the variety.After that,a subject consisting of 21 cities in four provinces,which are Guangdong,Zhejiang,Fujian and Jiangsu,are used to assess the assumption.Via the methodology of qualitative comparative analysis,the origin of policy variety and decisive factors get clearly proved.Based on case study and qualitative comparative analysis,the research gets two main achievements.It is clarified that factually local governments have been offering accesses to social services in two patterns.The pattern of“help free migration”,which allows people who enjoyed its benefits without getting any barriers blocking their moving from one region to another,narrows the gap between local residents and the others on social rights.Under this circumstance,however,it is needed to overcome the difficulties brought by high requirements to achieve a rightful Hukou,as the cost of full access to social rights.The pattern of“help Hukou attainment”offers access through lowering the entering requirements,which means for the group of immigrants who has no intention to be permanent local residents,the benefits are unavailable.Furthermore,local governments are always facing various external conditions,and it results in the variety of choices of patterns.For the cities facing the pressure of people loss,against which the competition of human resource goes,“help Hukou attainment”are more likely to be taken so as it attracts people to settle down permanently.But when it comes to cities in whose favor the competition goes,the other one is universally taken,which guarantees people complete freedom to move around.There is no doubt that the two discoveries mentioned above are obviously of benefit for better understanding of logistics and strategies of local governments,which have been working on reforming their own Hukou System after 18th CCP national congress.