Study The Function And Changes Of China's Household Registration System

In this paper, functions of China's household registration system and how they will change are deeply studied. Functions of the existing household registration system in China include population registration, social management, free migration limitation and additional social welfare distribution. Resident and transient population registration, birth and death registration, migration registration and change registration are all involved in the population registration function. Social management function mainly displays in following areas:Suppressing counterrevolutionaries and maintaining the new government in the early period after the founding of the People's Republic of China; preventing and cracking down on crimes; providing the population statistical data for government's economic and social management activities. Limiting free migration and distributing social welfare are the most notable characteristics of the functions of our country's existing household registration system. Although in specific historical period, the functions of the household registration system played a positive role in our country's development, their negative effects on economic development have become increasingly evident as the time progresses. Firstly, the functions of limiting free migration and distributing social welfare slow down the development of urbanization and modernization and hinder the integration of urban-rural dual structure. Secondly, they violate the market economy principles and block the development and perfect of socialist market economy. Thirdly, they impede the optimum allocation of labor resources in China and do harm to economic efficiency. Additionally, they lead to the result that the household registration system's primitive functions-registering population and providing demographic data can not effectively work.The negative effects of the existing household registration system functions far outweigh their positive effects, so it is necessary to promote the household registration system functions to change. The general trends of the function change are to remove the function of limiting free migration, strip the function of distributing social welfare, and strengthen the household registration function and the population statistical data provision function. External underlying forces, internal underlying forces and many favorable conditions jointly cause the household registration system functions to change. But the changes should follow certain paths. For the function of limiting free migration, it should gradually pull down the requirements of rural population settling in cities in order to achieve the aim of free population movement ultimately. For the function of distributing social welfare, removing employment and education discrimination against people from outside should be done first, together with expanding the urban social security coverage, followed by stripping the function of distributing social welfare and establishing a unified national social security system in the long-run. For the household registration function and the population statistical data provision function, recently unifying household registration administration and improving household registration work are very important, and in the future establishing a sound national population information management system must be done. The new household registration system functions will realize the abolition of restrictions on migration, the strip of social welfare, and the restoration and strengthening of the functions of population registration and providing demographic data. Function changes will bring great economic benefits, such as helping to speed up the urbanization and modernization, reducing the urban-rural gap and the rich-poor gap, improving economic efficiency and promoting better distribution of resources. Certain assuring conditions and measures are needed to promote the reality of the household registration system function changes. Some methods are used in this article, such as literature analysis method, comparative analysis method, the method of combining theories with practices and so on.