The admission quotas for metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai are far higher than those in other areas because they have many good universities, but still it is more difficult for students from other places, especially rural areas, to enter any of them. For example, in 2009, Peking University and Tsinghua University offered 570 seats to students with Beijing hukou but only 170 to those from Henan province, even though the number of applicants from Henan was nine times more than that from Beijing, says Liu Chuanjiang, a professor at Wuhan University.

Many experts have been demanding the annulment of the quota system to remove the difference between students with urban and rural hukou. Xiong Bingqi, vice-president of 21st Century Education, a private research institute, says there is need to establish an admission system where all candidates take the same exam. And apart from scores, the universities should also consider other qualities of the applicants to select them for admission.

But by making it mandatory for the universities to allot admission quotas, the government is preventing the establishment of such an open admission system, says Wu Zunmin, a professor of education at East China Normal University.

Also, the administrative system of the migrant population should be changed, says Yang Dongping, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology. Yang divides Chinese cities into three categories, each of which should adopt a different approach to hukou reform.

Mega-cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, he says, should go slow with the reform. Provincial capitals and other large cities, where the pressure of overpopulation is not as overwhelming as in Beijing and Shanghai, should implement the reform faster to help migrant workers become permanent urban residents. And in manufacturing towns, where the migrant population is larger than that of local residents, local governments should act with utmost urgency to help the migrant workers become permanent residents.

China has to gradually base its household management system on citizens' permanent residence rather than where they originally come from, Yang says. Migrant workers who have worked and paid taxes in a city for a certain number of years should be deemed permanent residents of that city. This way, the discrimination faced by their children, too, can be ended.

The author is a writer with China Daily. [email protected]

(China Daily 08/12/2014 page9)