As China’s housing market slows, Guangzhou’s Huadu District has announced a free household registration (hukou) policy for households buying homes there, opening the door to the local public education system for their children. Hukou is China’s household registration system, established in 1958. It is a legal document that records basic information about a household’s population, including a person’s name, date of birth, relatives, and marital status.
China’s household registration policy stipulates that residents can only send their children to public schools where they are officially registered. However, with these new moves, Huadu District is expected to waive some of these restrictions for out-of-towners buying homes in the area.
“We hope that the relaxation of hukou regulations will boost home buying demand and help improve the local economic situation,” a local official said at a press conference recently.
China: Free household registration if buying a house
Hukou exemption is China’s way of encouraging people to buy houses. Photo: IG.
The provision of temporary hukou is being seen by Huadu as part of a broader economic stimulus package that includes a property exchange program. The move is likely to stimulate some demand for housing, according to Chen Xueqiang, senior research fellow at China Index Academy. “We expect other localities with housing surplus problems to introduce similar measures,” Chen said.
The latest statistics show that in Huadu District, as of the end of July, there were 1.49 million square meters of unsold new housing. However, with the new policies in place, real estate sales in July increased by 27% compared to the same period last year.
Many other local governments have also relaxed down payment requirements and restrictions on second-home purchases to boost demand, but the effectiveness of these measures has been limited. And now some localities are going further by leveraging the benefits associated with the hukou system.
In addition, not only in Guangzhou but also in many other major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, traditional hukou policies are still strictly applied, with a point system based on education level, occupation and social insurance contributions. Immigrants applying for permanent residence must go through this assessment process.
To spur economic growth, the Chinese government has loosened the hukou system in recent years, allowing more people to move to larger cities and bring their families with them. In 2022, the government will remove hukou restrictions in all cities with populations under 3 million and encourage large cities with populations over 5 million to remove annual limits on the number of immigrants granted hukou rights.
The government also reaffirmed this commitment last month, with officials promising to better protect the rights of children of migrant workers to access a quality education.