Three steps to hukou heaven

• Source: Global Times
• [21:44 August 24 2009]
• Comments

By Zuo Maohong

Workers rest after lunch. Left:

The ambitious migrant worker dreams that the big city's roads are paved with gold. He imagines a land of rich opportunity, a route out of poverty.

As farmland shrinks and the income gap between rural and urban areas widens, he joins the flood of peasants increasingly leaving their hometowns to join the urban labor force.

He clings to an impossible dream of the city, a chance to change his or her residential status from a rural nobody to an urban somebody. But of course the reality is most migrants remain confined to the very humblest of jobs.

China had 225 million migrant workers, about 17 percent of the population, at the end of 2008, according to data released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security on August 4.

A migrant worker is defined as a person who works in a non-agricultural sector in an urban area, but their permanent residence – the hated “hukou” – is registered in a rural area, according to the State Council definition of 2006.

Millions try. Few succeed.

Global Times examines the three phases of migrant life in the city.