Freedom of Residence and Movement
Migrant worker Wu Yongzhong has sued the Guangdong Department of Civil Affairs for denying his claim for welfare payments on the basis of his hukou (household registration) status, according to a September 30 Beijing News report. Wu is an injured, unemployed electrician originally from Sichuan province who has worked in Guangzhou city for eight years.
District and city authorities denied welfare benefits that Wu claims he is owed under local regulations on minimum living subsidies for urban residents. Department of Civil Affairs officials cite Wu's lack of a local Guangzhou hukou as a reason for denying his claim. Wu has challenged the denial in the Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court.
A government program to settle Tibetan nomadic herders has placed about 10,000 families in Qinghai province (89 percent of the nomads) in communities of fixed dwellings, according to an October 4 report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The government program may mean the end of a traditional way of life that Tibetans, Mongols, and other ethnic groups in China regard as integral to their culture and self-identity.
The Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Communist Party Central Committee has required all news media in Shanghai to launch "self examinations" and conduct "targeted professional education and training," according to a report in the June 25 edition of the People's Daily. Citing Xinhua, the article reports that Shanghai's major newspapers and electronic media, including the Liberation Daily Press Group, the Wenhui Xinmin United Press Group, and the Shanghai Media Group, organized political indoctrination and vocational study sessions, and offered specific measures to "establish and perfect coordinated and effective long-term administrative mechanisms for pre-reporting strict examination and approval, as well as for post-reporting review, monitoring, and examination."
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The Congressional-Executive Commission on China held another in its series of staff-led Issues Roundtables, entitled "China's Household Registration (Hukou) System: Discrimination and Reform" on Friday, September 2, from 2:00 - 3:30 PM in Room 2168 of the Rayburn House Office Building.
The Supreme People’s Court (SPC) has issued a Reply to the Zhejiang High People’s Court confirming that people’s courts may not directly accept civil lawsuits involving disputes over compensation for urban evictions. The Reply provides that such disputes must first be submitted to administrative adjudication boards under procedures outlined in China’s Urban Housing Demolition and Relocation Management Regulations. Under the Regulations, parties must submit compensation disputes to administrative adjudication tribunals, and may appeal to higher level administrative organs and/or file an administrative lawsuit in a people’s court to challenge the adjudication decision if they are not satisfied.
Citizen representatives invited to comment on Beijing's municipal development plans demanded tighter restrictions on rural migrants, including tough hukou (household registration) policies and strict controls on providing housing and employment to migrants, according to a Southern Daily article. Commentary by scholars that was posted on the East Day Web site, however, called for a more cautious approach.
A Shanghai court has sentenced two employees of a demolition and relocation company to death with a two-year reprieve for setting fires to intimidate local residents, according to a China Daily article. A third employee was sentenced to life in prison. Wang Changkun, Yang Sunqin, and Lu Peide of the Shanghai Urban Development Housing Relocation Co. set the blazes in early January in an effort to intimidate recalcitrant residents into moving out of a development zone, killing two people. The neighborhood has reportedly experienced a series of twelve fires since 2004. The case illustrates the often close connections between local government and developers and demolition units. A state-owned enterprise owns a 50 percent stake in the demolition and relocation company.
Police clashed with ethnic Mongol villagers in late June and July in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in an unresolved land dispute that left dozens of villagers injured and tensions high. A local government official described the situation as "anarchy," according to a July 27 Reuters report. The Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center (SMHRIC) reports that hundreds of police used tear gas, grenades, and other explosives against villagers on July 21 and 23.
A January sweep of vagrants and mentally ill persons in Ganzhou city, Jianxi province, left five people missing and presumed dead, reports the China Youth Daily. According to the report, as part of an official effort to clean up the city, Ganzhou city civil affairs and public security officials rounded up seven vagrants and local mental patients, gave them some food, then drove them to a remote part of a neighboring county at night. The officials left the seven by the roadside in harsh winter weather. Two of the vagrants found their way back to Ganzhou, but five others in the group, including two mentally ill people who lived in the town, were still missing nearly six months later. After an exhaustive search, their families presume they are dead.