Behind the hukou is the social security and welfare of a region. Beijing and Shanghai are not the only ones that are strict, and the overall hukou is not lenient because it involves the distribution of benefits. In this process, we can easily feel the serious inequality. We have grown up in an environment of academic origin theory, and there is a consensus that people “should” be stratified according to their education. For example, in Shanghai, people think it’s fine to let talents from Tsinghua University and Peking University settle in the city, and that this is how they should be treated, but they forget that the origin of household registration is essentially parents.
Wherever your parents are, that’s where your origin is.
And what you really need to account for with your household registration is actually a social security account. Suppose you have just graduated from college and come to Shanghai to find a job with a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan, and the enterprise pays you 14,000 yuan a month, you get 8,000 yuan, of which 6,000 yuan are taxes and social security. In other words, as a young worker, you bring in about 70,000 yuan a year to Shanghai.
When you look at this figure, you can immediately see why Hangzhou, which is the second largest city in China, would pay 20,000 yuan for college students to settle down and work in the city. This is actually a good deal from the local government’s point of view.
So if you look at Yang Yang, what is she like? Her company just completed a 6 month 70 million dollar revenue bet. What do you think it was like for Shanghai to attract Yang to settle in the city as a whole?
It was Lingang’s tax policy that attracted Yang to open a company in Lingang, allowing a top talent like Yang to pay taxes there. The household registration is a gift to her. Because people in different social status have different needs.
Do you think Yang Gao, who has achieved 70 million in revenue in 6 months, needs to apply for low rent housing? Will she need health insurance to cover her expenses? Will she worry about her children not being able to go to a good school if she has children?
She has no such worries, she is not like us. For such people, local governments around the world have always had special household registration policies, no academic requirements, and they are invited by local governments to settle down.
They are different from ordinary people like us. Even the best among us who have been admitted to Tsinghua University and Peking University, as long as the family is ordinary, it is almost impossible for them to buy their own house in Beijing and Shanghai with their own income. So even such people, with a salary of maybe 15,000 yuan just after graduation, also hope to apply for low-rent housing, and they also hope that the same as the local homeless people in Beijing and Shanghai, they can live in low-rent for the rest of their lives.
But the reality is that they will not have such a house. By the time they reach middle age, their income will not go up all the time. They will also have a mid-life crisis, and when the rent starts to eat up most of their income, they will transition out of the first-tier cities and let their younger and more energetic younger siblings settle down and take their place.
By the time they leave Shanghai, the Shanghai hukou will be a rib for them. Beijing, for example, has already started to retire its collective households this year, because the population cap in Beijing will be in effect from 2020 and in Shanghai from 2025.
Older people, who can’t earn money on their own, but also need social welfare support, are not needed talents anymore, but the burden of social security.
People’s positions will change.
We ordinary people are not the same as Yang Yang. What she is considering is more about the local tax benefits in Lingang, while what we need to consider is where our real future lies. Each city has its own system, and if we are an outsider, we must be clear about where we really stand.
It’s important to know where you stand.
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