On Monday, 13 mainland newspapers called for the abolition of China's hukou household registration laws, slamming them as inequitable and corrupt.
'China's people have been suffering from the hukou system for a long time,' the papers thundered in a joint editorial, which blamed the scheme for China's widening urban-rural wealth divide. No doubt the hukou system is just as iniquitous as the papers say, but getting rid of it is likely to prove a lot more troublesome than their editors seem to believe.
Widely compared to apartheid-era South Africa's hated Pass Laws, the hukou system pigeonholes China's citizens as residents of the place they were born. Introduced in 1958 to ensure farmers remained on the land, where they had no choice but to sell their produce to the state at controlled prices, the hukou system has long been condemned as an outdated relic of a vanished age.
Today the original prohibitions on citizens' freedom of movement are seldom enforced, and hundreds of millions of mainlanders born in poor rural areas now live and work in booming cities.
But the hukou's enduring restrictions mean that those migrants are treated as second-class citizens in their new homes. Because their hukou documents classify them as residents of another district, they cannot get public housing, their children are refused entry to local schools, and often they are ineligible for medical insurance schemes.
The obvious effects of this inequitable treatment have been widely discussed and roundly condemned. The lack of welfare provision for migrants has tended to discourage the movement of workers to China's cities. The disincentive has kept many in the countryside where their productivity is low, and has created labour shortages in the industrialised coastal cities.
That is not only inefficient, it has exacerbated the wealth gap between China's cities and its countryside. Yesterday, the government announced that average urban incomes last year were 3.33 times incomes in rural areas; a record divergence (see first chart).