Chinese census-taking reveals rights awareness

After years of reforms that have reduced the government's once-pervasive involvement in most people's lives, some Chinese are proving reluctant to give up personal information and harboring suspicions about what the government plans to do with their details.

“Along with China's development, the people's awareness of legal, personal and privacy rights has been increasing,” said Ji Lin, executive vice mayor of Beijing whose office is overseeing the census in the capital.

“When we were little, it wasn't this way. If the police wanted to check hukous (Chinese household registration documents), they would just walk in with barely a knock. You can't do that anymore,” he said.

Accounting for a population more than four times the size of the United States is set to take place from Nov. 1 to 10. Currently, census volunteers are going door-to-door across China, taking an initial poll of how many people live in each home and recording cell phone numbers so workers can get in touch when the census officially begins.

Taking an accurate census in China is a difficult task with the millions of migrant workers who've left their official addresses in the countryside for better opportunities in the cities.

Another complicating issue is the children born in violation of the country's one-child policy, many of whom are unregistered and therefore have no legal identity. They could number in the millions. The government has said it would lower or waive the hefty penalty fees required for those children to obtain identity cards, though so far it appears there hasn't been much response to the limited amnesty.

In cities like Beijing, though, workers have encountered residents reluctant to allow the volunteers into their homes or answer their questions. Recent state media reports have stressed that the census workers must maintain confidentiality, though suspicions remain.

“Some people resist it because they may worry about how the information might be used by the government to investigate their wealth, for example, how many properties they have or perhaps they don't want their 'gray income' to become public. These people are often rich or corrupt,” said Liu Shanying, associate researcher with the Institute of Political Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Those concerns may be well-founded. The State Statistics Bureau will use the census to examine the real estate market in parts of several cities to determine how many homes were purchased by speculators and are sitting empty, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Thursday.

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