China’s cities compete for kids

AS A RULE, China’s central planners do not say much about love. But look closely at recent plans from some reform-minded provinces—notably schemes that try to address a shrinking population—and appeals to hearts as well as minds leap from the page.

Take, for instance, a five-year plan to help rural migrants settle down in the cities of Zhejiang, a prosperous coastal province, and ideally to bring their young children with them. At first sight, Zhejiang’s proposal, issued in July and covering 2023 to 2027, is dry stuff. One section explains how, in every city except the provincial capital, Hangzhou, recently arrived families can access places at city-funded schools and other public services. They qualify without buying a home or securing a local hukou (household registration). The hukou system has been used to regulate internal migration since Maoist times, when the Communist Party feared hungry peasants might crowd into cities. On the ground in Zhejiang the human import of these changes is well understood.

Chaguan travelled to Yiwu, a city of 1.9m in Zhejiang that is a trading hub for small commodities, supplying the world with pencils and parasols, shoelaces and shopping trolleys. He heard locals and migrants weigh the likely impact of relaxed residency rules on Yiwu’s economy, on school waiting lists and on housing prices. Strikingly often, the same people then stopped talking about statistics and spoke of how the reforms make them feel.

Though Zhejiang stands out for reforming zeal, cities across China are being encouraged to hand out hukou papers more easily. Some are opening public services to migrants who prefer to remain registered in their rural birthplaces. Both economics and demographics are driving change. Fertility rates are dropping fast and China’s population declined in 2022 for the first time since the early 1960s. Natives of some of China’s biggest and richest cities are proving indifferent to offers of baby-bonuses and other government incentives. Far-sighted provinces and cities are now focusing on a stock of young people who have already been born: China’s 67m “left-behind children”. That is the term for youngsters being raised by relatives or in boarding schools in villages, county towns or minor provincial cities, while one or both parents works as a migrant away from home.

Even some of China’s biggest cities are anxious about maintaining their populations, says Lu Ming, an economist at Shanghai Jiaotong University and a prominent advocate of hukou reform. What is more, China is generating fewer of the factory jobs that can be filled by migrants straight from the countryside, and creating more service-sector jobs that require an understanding of city folk and their ways, notes Professor Lu. By way of example he cites jobs in nursing or housekeeping or as decorators, adding that workers raised and educated in cities are best placed to fill such vacancies. Cities have been offering hukous to university graduates and other skilled workers for years. Now, the contest is on for blue-collar families, the professor suggests.

Not every city has the means to compete. Yiwu, a wealthy place, has spent heavily on wooing young families this year. To help outsiders, the city closed 28 private schools that catered to migrant children, some of which charged as much as 20,000 yuan ($2,811) a year. Others offered classes in shabby industrial premises. The city converted 24 into publicly funded schools, bringing 25,000 migrant children into the state sector. It built new primary schools, too, with one campus costing 224m yuan.

Migrant parents have mixed reactions. Yiwu’s wide avenues are lined with commercial complexes devoted to specific industries. Outside a centre for stationery merchants, your columnist found three men from the same rural corner of Hunan province. They eke out a living selling adhesive price labels from plastic crates balanced on electric scooters. One used to pay over 6,000 yuan a year to send his child to a local private school. The same school is now public and costs him a tenth of that. Yiwu “wants to hang on to more outsiders”, suggests that lucky father. A younger colleague will not be moving his 13-year-old daughter from Hunan to the city, however. “Of course, she’d prefer to live with her parents,” he admits. But he and his wife both work in Yiwu, often till midnight or later. “We don’t have time to take care of the child here,” says the label-seller, smoking as he waits for customers.

Inside the mall, a mother of one from elsewhere in Zhejiang sells children’s diaries and pens to buyers from around the world. The reforms leave her both grateful and sceptical. Migrants who rent homes and pay social-security contributions can now access city schools, even without a full hukou, she agrees. But they rarely land spots at Yiwu’s best schools. Homeowners and longstanding hukou-holders have a higher priority than newcomers who rent, she explains. In a nearby shop, a mother of two who moved to Yiwu years ago reports that she paid a hefty premium to live near a good school. She ventures that it would be “very unfair” on homebuyers if the newcomers could access the best schools.

A benign contest for growth

Some migrants prefer a life in two places. Some keep a rural hukou to maintain their rights to village land. A woman from southern China may send her daughter back to her home province to take university-entrance exams in ten years’ time. Back home, the competition is less “ferocious” than in wealthy Zhejiang, she says.

In a playground near a new primary school, a retired migrant worker from Hunan talks proudly of her grown children and the four grandchildren that she now helps to raise, each of whom has a hukou from Yiwu. A generation ago, her own children lived in her home village and she saw them twice a year. She supposes that her children missed her, she says, with a strained laugh. “But I don’t know and I would not ask.” China remains full of such sad tales. Self-interest now prompts cities and provinces to help more families stay together. Easing heartache will be one of their rewards. ■

Read more from Chaguan, our columnist on China:
China and the EU risk a trade war (Dec 7th)
China’s economy is suffering from long covid (Nov 30th)
Why Xi Jinping sounds friendlier to America (Nov 23rd)

Also: How the Chaguan column got its name