China begins recording of first census in a decade

Despite a television advertising blitz and thousands of propaganda banners exhorting residents to co-operate with census-takers, officials have admitted that collecting accurate data is increasingly difficult in the world’s largest autocratic state.

Chief among those avoiding officials are China’s estimated 200 million migrant workers, couples who have had an illegal birth under the one-child policy and property-owning middle classes anxious not to reveal their true assets to the taxman.

The reluctance to co-operate has highlighted changing attitudes to individual privacy in China where a growing percentage of people no longer rely on the government for their housing, healthcare and the education of their children.

An online poll on the popular sina.com website showed that a third of respondents said they were not comfortable letting census-takers into their homes, with other websites and chat forums dispensing tips on how to avoid giving up information.

“Along with China’s development, the people’s awareness of legal, personal and privacy rights has been increasing,” said Ji Lin, the executive vice mayor of Beijing in charge of the census, in the run-up to the count.

“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.” China’s population counts have long been a subject of scepticism. A survey last year put the population at 1.334 billion, although some demographers have estimated the figure to be as high as 1.5 billion. The number of unregistered children is thought to exceed 1m.

However this time the government has taken steps to ensure a more accurate count, including up to a 70 per cent reduction in fines for migrants that fail to register with police when they move to the city or for parents with illegal children who can be fined up to £20,000.

“The census is the basis for making policies on education, medical care, employment and social warfare and aid,” the Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily said in an editorial in an apparent effort to focus on the benign intentions behind the survey.

But at a building site in central Beijing on Monday it was clear that much nervousness remained. “I’ve been here for two months without registering,” said one migrant labourer from the central province of Sichuan during his lunch-break, “we’ll just lie low or go home for a week.” Others, like Jiang Chunyan, a mother and migrant worker who was at home between shifts looking after her rowdy three-year-old son, were happy to co-operate with the survey but sceptical of the government’s pledge that the information would be used to improve her lot.

Mrs Jiang, a department store saleswoman from Hebei province who earns with her husband a joint income of £500 a month, says she still cannot find a kindergarten place for her son despite being able to afford fees of more than £700 a year.

“We’ve lived in Beijing for a decade, but we could live here for 1,000 years and still not get a Beijing 'hukou’ [registration]. I’m not afraid to give them the information, I have my temporary registration, I just don’t have a school place for my child.” Such social stresses are increasingly common in China where wealth inequalities are rising sharply and the success of the one-child policy has raised worrying questions about how China’s labour force, which will begin to shrink from 2015, can its pensioners in the decades to come.

Despite the difficulties, however, Chinese officials say the census will be the most detailed ever, with a margin of error of less than two per cent — or 26.7m people. The preliminary results will be announced in April.