Document #1025405
IRB – Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (Author)
According to a spokesperson at the PRC
embassy in Ottawa, the household registration system is still used
in the People's Republic of China. If a person changes her or his
address, a transfer of the household registration must be applied
for at the local office of the Public Security Bureau. This
application for transfer is then presented to the same office in
the person's new place of residence. Usually, according to the
embassy spokesperson, moves, births and deaths are recorded in the
household register. The "book" is kept by each family, but changes
are made only by the Public Security Bureau. The registration can
be "annulled" if the whole family emigrates, but if some family
members leave, their registration is "removed." Usually, there are
no periodic checks of the registration, according to the Chinese
official. When asked what happens when it is discovered that
someone registered in the household registration "book" is no
longer resident at that address, the embassy spokesperson noted
that this "very rarely happens" because it is the responsibility of
each household to report changes in status to the local office of
the Public Security Bureau.
According to an Asia Watch researcher in
New York, the household register, or Hukou system, is still used in
China to specify where a person is allowed to reside. It is a very
"tight" system which restricts internal movement, according to Asia
Watch, and it is being strictly enforced recently. If a person has
not registered in a certain city, then that person is not allowed
to reside there. Even if one were a resident of a certain city and
went to spend one night at the home of an acquaintance in another
city, one would be obliged to register this fact at the local
Public Security Bureau.
According to the Asia Watch researcher,
police regularly do spot-checks of the household register and a
person resident in a house who is not properly registered can
possibly be detained and then checked for political background,
i.e. connections to the pro-democracy movements.
The information provided by the Chinese
Embassy and Asia Watch cannot currently be corroborated in written
sources available to the IRBDC, with the exception of that
information previously available in Response to Information Request
No. CHN4015.