Tag Archives: rights

The prospect for health care rights in China

Cao, Lijing, (2012), The prospect for health care rights in China, 72 p. Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto. (accessed 18 december 2013)

The 2009 reform of China’s health care system attempts to lower the burden of medical costs and provide universal access to health care. This thesis focuses on a particular access and equity gap within the health care system that faced by internal migrants, and explores the potential value of a legally enforceable and justiciable right to health care in the Chinese context to address such gaps. Despite recent advances in the health care reform, lack of a framework of health care rights could be a limiting factor to current health care initiatives which are falling short of their promises of universality in some way. In the long run, establishment of such framework could be a direction that deserves further research.

Full text available on line https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/33715/1/Cao_Lijing_201211_LLM_thesis.pdf

Léa Daures

Léa Daures, historian and student at the Ecole des Bibliothécaires Documentalistes (School for Librarians and Information Professions, http://www.ebd.fr), works part-time at the UMR China Korea Japan. She is currently monitoring information online on the subject of migrants in China for UrbaChina.

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Beijing’s low-wage migrants: hikers in the urbanisation and growth process

Liu, R., Wong, T.-C. and Liu, S. (2013), Low-wage migrants in northwestern Beijing, China: The hikers in the urbanisation and growth process. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 54:3, pp. 352–371. doi: 10.1111/apv.12029

Abstract

In the post-Mao era from the 1980s, market reforms have seen profit-led neoliberal forces being introduced into China’s urban spatial movements. In supporting such movements, labour mobility is allowed but the hukou system has been retained to prevent urban informality and slum formation and to control municipal public expenses. Without residency permits granted by the host cities, low-wage rural migrants enjoy little ‘right to the city’ and are deprived of local welfare and benefits. They often become ‘drifting tenants’, frequently driven by urban renewal, rising rentals and change of jobs. This study examines the spatial effect of causes (residency system) and consequences (frequent shifts in residence) experienced by low-skilled and low-wage migrants. A survey was conducted from February to mid-April 2011 in northwestern Beijing’s Great Zhongguancun area which shows and the marginalised state of displaced migrant tenants. This includes their adaptations to change, the pattern, causes and history of their intra-city mobility.

 

Monique Abud

Centre d'études sur la Chine moderne et contemporaine, EHESS, Paris, France

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