China's middle class chafes against red tape

A rambunctious girl with a fondness for drawing and robots, Jessica Cherry looks like a typical 5-year-old. But in the eyes of the Chinese government she is invisible. Though her Scottish father obtained a British passport for the child, the government regards her as Chinese, as she was born in Beijing to a Chinese mother.

Because her parents did not get a mandatory birth permit, it is practically impossible for Jessica to acquire a Chinese passport and other documents that define citizenship here. That has forced her family to obtain a special “exit-entry permit” each time she leaves China.

The bureaucratic jujitsu usually takes around 50 days, said her mother, Daisy Li, a media producer, who has applied for the permit nine times. “It makes me curse, and it makes me cry,” she said.

China’s bureaucracy has long been a bewildering maze of “relevant departments,” official red-ink seals and stone-faced functionaries. Supplicants ricochet from one government office to another, sometimes across the country, in their quest for the permits needed to get through daily life.

To get a license plate for a new car, for example, a resident of Beijing must win a pass in a lottery in which the odds of success are less than 1 per cent. Women often obtain permits allowing them to give birth after they wed, but they usually expire after two years. Unmarried women are ineligible for them. Applying for a student loan can require as many as 26 official seals on more than a dozen documents. Just starting a new job and registering for public benefits can mean amassing a small mountain of documents, including a certified background check by the police in one’s place of birth.

As its ranks grow, China’s middle class – wired, ambitious and worldly – is increasingly unwilling to tolerate such obstacles, the vestiges of a capricious Mao-era bureaucracy that still holds sway over most of the important aspects of people’s personal lives.
For many educated city dwellers, it is red tape, more than news media censorship and heavy-handed propaganda, that serves as a grinding reminder of the Communist Party’s dominion over their lives. “The government isn’t there to make our lives easier,” Li said. “They’ve set up all those rules so the people are easier to control.”

Analysts say such frustrations feed public discontent at a time when the party is trying to bolster its appeal by combating corruption, promising a more reliable legal system and  easing the constraints on small businesses. Party media this week promoted a profile of President Xi Jinping’s years as a local leader who noted his motto for cutting through bureaucracy in government: “Deal with it instantly.”

Keeping the middle class happy, China’s leaders have come to realise, is also vital for the party’s long-term survival. Concerns about potential social unrest starting within the urban elite are not far-fetched.

Last year, for example, the authorities jailed a number of prominent legal activists after they organised a grassroots campaign, the New Citizens Movement, that used litigation, social media and public rallies to demand civil rights and government transparency.

Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, described the nation’s bureaucracy as a time-tested mechanism for social and political control, one that functions as “an unmovable layer insulating the top leader from popular pressure.” “In China, after you go through the red tape, you don’t get an outcome or an explanation,” he said. “The system is designed to allow bureaucrats to do nothing and get away with it.”

China’s seven million public servants have long been a target of scorn by citizens who accuse them of endemic laziness and corruption.

In the southwestern province of Yunnan, officials at a local land reclamation bureau often leave for lunch at around 10:30 a.m., returning after 3 p.m. “It simply gets too hot to do any work,” Pan Yuwen, an agricultural adviser, said one rainy day last month when the temperature was a less-than-sultry 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

But more than lackadaisical bureaucrats, it is the tangle of regulations that infuriates many ordinary Chinese. At the heart of their ire is the hukou, or family registration, an onerous system akin to an internal passport that often tethers services like public education, subsidised healthcare and pensions to their parents’ birthplace – even if that person never lived there.

Created in the 1950s and designed to restrict the flow of rural villagers into large cities, the hukou system has become widely detested in recent years. Hundreds of millions of migrants have flocked to work in China’s booming metropolises, and critics say the system makes them second-class citizens and subjects them to widespread discrimination in schooling, housing and employment.

Impact on education
For many Chinese, the most troubling impact of hukou restrictions affects their child’s access to education. The nation’s make-or-break university entrance exam is crafted and scored by each province and major city. But only students with a Beijing hukou are allowed to take the exam in the capital, compelling young rural migrants with temporary residence permits to head back to outer provinces.

There they confront exam materials that differ widely from what they studied in class. Rural students also have to contend with admissions quotas, set by the central government, that favour students from large cities.

“When I first learned about the unfairness of the system, I was shocked because it’s so different from what this country is preaching every day,” said Wang Xiaoxia, 44, an accountant who moved here 13 years ago from the northern province of Liaoning. “I pay my taxes, do my work and fulfill my obligation. But when it comes to the right to education and other benefits I’m excluded from Beijing.”

In 2012, Wang joined a group of parents who petitioned the Beijing Education Commission to allow their children to take the exam in the capital. After their repeated petitions failed, the parents sued the municipal government last year. They lost.
The hukou bureaucracy forces many migrants to choose between their child and their livelihood. As a result, about one-fifth of Chinese children, more than 61 million, live without their parents in villages.

One recent afternoon, Li Ying, 39, sat in a fluorescent-lit Beijing government office, waiting for her number to be called so she could apply for a temporary residence permit that would allow her 6-year-old son to enrol in school. Although Li moved to Beijing with her parents as a child in 1981, her hukou is registered in a distant town, meaning her son will be shut out of the city’s public schools without the permit.

The application process is emblematic of the bureaucratic gantlet many Chinese endure. Among the 14 required documents, Li must provide her hukou certificate, proof of residence, a diploma, a job contract, a marriage license, her husband’s identity card, his hukou, a certificate proving she has only one child and a company document detailing her work performance and tax payments.

“What a headache,” she said, a pile of paperwork balanced on her lap. “Red tape is good for the government but not for us Chinese people.”