Ye Tan (www.nbd.com.cn): China's latest round of urbanization necessitates a new round of reforms on household registration featuring openness, liberalization and mobility-friendliness. Nobody questions the meaningfulness of such reform while discussions center on the enforcement level, such as fairer funding for social security benefits.

Under China's current fiscal and taxation system, a local government's budget income is drawn from higher level authorities, while its size depends on its household registration population. Therefore, local governments are willing to shoulder the expenses for distributing social security benefits among people with local hukou.

For example, in order to allow the children of migrant workers to receive free compulsory education at a local school, large cities have to strain their educational budget. A more fair solution could be to require governments of places where these families register their hukou to issue education coupons, which can be used in cities where they currently reside. Thus, the financial burden on cities of their current residence can be reduced.

Meanwhile, China's social welfare system is based on outdated practice. Although many local trial reforms intend to abolish the difference between rural and urban residents, they are only partially successful at best.

Local governments are not very enthusiastic about pushing thorough reforms as they are obliged to create jobs for farmers who have become urban residents, even though most are poorly educated and have received minimum vocational training. Meanwhile, regional governments across China can benefit from the current status quo as they have invested in a large number of infrastructure projects, which can hire farmers as laborers.

Meanwhile, the core of China's social welfare system reform is to stop treating rural and urban residents differently. Reform should not be targeted at building "a welfare state" such as in France and Germany. Instead, China should look to the United States as a model to improve its social welfare system.

Reform of China's household registration system must be advanced. Without it, the country's urbanization campaign, adjustment of economic structure and drive to build a modern country would be insufficient in promoting economic growth. In the meantime, reform must be carefully designed to be enforceable, seeing as too dramatic a change within a short period of time could backfire.

Yang Zhiyong (Guangzhou Daily): Basically, hukou at different places represents different levels of public services a person is entitled to. Usually, an urban hukou is highly sought after as it stands for better public services in employment, medical care and education.

Since the beginning of China's reform and opening up at the end of the 1970s, cities have been creating a lot of job opportunities, some of which are filled by migrant workers. However, not many of them are able to obtain an urban hukou. As a result, a lot of migrants travel between different cities to find jobs without settling, an important factor behind the extremely high traffic load around the Spring Festival. Many of these workers want an urban hukou, a desire that is particularly strong among younger generations who grew up in cities and only visit the countryside during holidays.

In the short term, reform designers need to work to narrow the difference in public services offered to rural and urban residents, which has also been set as an important target by public policy decision-makers. However, realizing such a goal takes time.

As the government has been increasing investment in social security programs over the recent years, especially via the new rural cooperative medical scheme and new rural pension program, public services enjoyed by rural residents have been improving. The urban-rural gap, in terms of social welfare benefits, has narrowed. Meanwhile, with the development of a market economy, an urban hukou no longer means more job opportunities as most employers recruit candidates based on their particular merits.

In reality, even among people with urban hukou, those of different professions also enjoy pensions, medical insurance and educational resources in differing ways. In contrast, people with a rural hukou can always rely on proceeds from their farmland. During China's urbanization, farmland can provide owners with lucrative income from means other than agricultural production. For example, farmers whose land is expropriated will receive a large sum of compensation from the government. Therefore, some farmers who can apply for an urban hukou, choose to stick to their original residence.

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