Opinion | Lunacy of Lunar New Year travel must spur hukou reform
Hu Shuli says the distortions of a two-track household registration system cannot be corrected with an unco-ordinated, piecemeal approach
The Lunar New Year travel crunch this year was worse than ever, according to initial estimates that said some 3.4 billion passenger trips were made during this time, an increase of 8.6 per cent from last year.
This is no figure to be proud of. In fact, it's deeply worrying because it underlines the distortions in China's urbanisation.
Millions of migrant workers go home for the new year holiday. The wave starts from the Beijing-Tianjin area, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, spreading northeast, northwest and southwest to the rest of the country, with the returning wave going in the opposite direction when the holiday has ended.
As the rapid growth in the number of people on the move shows, Chinese urbanisation is increasingly lopsided and may be reaching a breaking point.
Urbanisation is the natural consequence of economic development, as people move off the land and into the city for work. On paper, more than 51 per cent of Chinese live in cities. In reality, of course, for many of them, their home is in a village; the city is a place they live in, but it isn't home. This is half-baked urbanisation. Furthermore, the heavy concentration of industries in the coastal regions fails to deliver the goal of balanced development.
These conditions have created an army of migrant labourers on the mainland, their sheer numbers unmatched anywhere else.