Xi's views on Hukou reform in his doctoral dissertation

Photocopy of the cover of the 169-page doctorate dissertation of Chinese president Xi Jinping. The paper was dated on December 2001 with the origional copy kept at Tsinghua University Library. [Photo: Beijingnews]

A doctoral dissertation penned by Chinese president Xi Jinping 13 years ago on the marketization in China's rural areas has been found to contain contents about Hukou reform, the Beijing News reports.

The dissertation became public today.

China's permanent residence system, or as it is more popularly known, the Hukou system, is deemed one of the country's most controversial policy.

Established in the 1950s, it's aimed to control population migration, largely from rural to urban areas.

The 169-page work was finished during the years between 1998 and 2002 when Xi studied Marxist theory and ideological and political education in the In-service Postgraduate Class at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University.

Serving at the time as the governor of Fujian province, he suggested the dual residence system - a historical expediency - which divides the Chinese into rural and non-rural households, be abolished in due course.

In his opinion, the Hukou system designed to keep people at their places of birth for the sake of convenient management had become a major hindrance to China's urbanization, which called for relaxed migration controls.

A Hukou hand book contains the records of its holder's family roots, category(farming or non-farming) and permanent residence.

The book is needed almost in every corner of a Chinese citizen's life, from applying for a birth certificate to applying for a job.

But the difference between the two kinds of Hukou leads to discriminative treatments.

Besides better social security benefits and public services, an urban Hukou can even bring higher compensation in a traffic accident.

But as people with a city Hukou and a rural Hukou nearly shoulder the same cost of living in cities, Xi stated in the thesis that this dwindling difference calls for a speedy reform of the intrinsically discriminative system.

He also laid out a roadmap for this reform.

In his opinion, those migrant workers who had economically turned into city residents should be granted equal residence status with their city neighbors.

And he posited that an outright abolishment of the policy can be piloted in the small townships before being adopted in big cities.

On various occasions throughout these 13 years, Xi, whose family roots are in China's rural inland province of Shaanxi, has elaborated his thoughts on Hukou reform.

During a party leadership meeting this June, he said the timing has never been more urgent for pushing through this reform.