China's Silicon Valley Eases Controls on Residency Rules

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, January 03, 2003

China's Silicon Valley Eases Controls on Residency Rules

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Only 14.7 percent of the new employees at the Beijing-based Zhongguancun High-tech Development Zone, or China's Silicon Valley, are permanent Beijing citizens, signifying a major breakthrough in the city's employment policy.

The figure from a new survey was disclosed by Wang Liping, director of the Human Resources Bureau of Zhongguancun's Administrative Office.

Beijing, the capital of China with a population of more than 13million and a huge number of migratory people from outside its area seeking entry every year, tended to enforce stricter control than other cities on granting residential permits, Wang said.

But to boost the high-tech zone's development, a much more flexible employment policy has been introduced since its establishment in 1988.

In their just-ended employment survey for the year 2003, Wang said, about 63.09 percent of new employees had been recruited although they did not have a permanent household registration in Beijing, or "Beijing Hukou" as it is often called in Chinese. This would have keep them off any jobs in the capital.

"People coming from other regions have indeed become a major productive force at the development zone," he said.

To attract more skilled employees, Wang said, authorities had designed a three-year-program to train more workers especially those specializing in software development, high-tech enterprise management, marketing, and financing and those well versed in the rules of the World Trade Organization and international laws.

Meanwhile, they were also striving to provide more benefits for the workers at the Zhongguancun Zone such as housing and social security benefits.

China's existing household registration system, set up during the planned economy years to divide the country into two distinctive urban and rural spheres, has long been a barrier to the free movement of urban workers.

To improve the situation, the Ministry of Public Security introduced reforms on October 1, 2001 to the existing residency system in all county-level cities and administrative towns.

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