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The ties that bind

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Information-technology engineer Zhang Yong has lived in Beijing with his wife Wang Caiying for eight years. They met in the city, fell in love, and in 2004 bought a house in the northern suburbs.

The birth of their son two years ago gave the couple a reality check. They were told that the boy was not entitled to a Beijing hukou - residence registration - as neither of them had one. Instead, they would have to go back to Zhang's hometown in Liaoning to obtain a hukou for their son there.

'We will have to choose to buy a place in a Beijing primary school [which can cost thousands of yuan] or send him to a school in my hometown when he reaches school age in five years,' a worried Wang said.

The mainland has been the scene of some of the most ambitious social-development policies ever envisaged. Many of these policies were designed to manage and control the country's huge and ballooning population. The population of the People's Republic doubled from 500 million to almost a billion in just three decades.

It now stands at more than 1.3 billion after Beijing imposed strict population controls 30 years ago.

The demographic challenge brought by this astonishing growth aggravated shortages of resources faced by the country and hindered its social and economic development. Beijing responded with drastic measures.

Among these, the one-child policy and the hukou system are the most controversial. The hukou system, in a stroke, split the country into rural and urban areas, while the one-child policy slammed the brakes on a breeding frenzy. Apart from the mainland, only North Korea and the tiny African nation of Benin have residence restrictions similar to the hukou system. The one-child policy is unique globally.

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