China must relax residency curbs, land rights to offset effect of trade war, former finance minister says
- China’s former finance minister Lou Jiwei has urged Beijing to ease curbs on residency and land ownership to offset the effects of the trade war
- The outspoken reformist official said the two systems had caused a ‘series of economic, social and political problems’
China should speed up reform of its household registration and land-use systems to offset the impact of the trade war with the United States by encouraging the free flow of capital and labour, an outspoken former Chinese finance minister said.
In an article published on Tuesday, Lou Jiwei, who led China’s Ministry of Finance between 2013 and 2016, urged the central government to undertake rapid reform of the two systems in the face of rising populism and anti-globalisation.
“The current household registration system [in China] is a significant and unreasonable institutional problem,” Lou wrote in an article published by the economic magazine Comparative Studies.
The defects of the two fundamental systems have caused a series of economic, social and political problems … it is really time for us to solve them
The former minister also argued that China’s restrictive rural land-ownership model was a legacy of China’s command economy and that it segregated the countryside from urban areas, preventing Beijing from developing a unified “socialist market economy” with free flows of labour and capital.
