Home » Opinion » Chinese Views
Expats gain more freedoms
By Cheng Yunjie |
May 27, 2010, Thursday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CHINESE government officials and academics have started planning the country's first draft immigration law to better manage the increasing number of immigrants.
Unlike Western countries, which have special laws to regulate the management of transnational migrants, regulations only sporadically appeared in Chinese legal instruments concerning entry and exit administration, said Zhang Jijiao, a researcher with the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
The first and foremost Western experience worth noting is the classification of transnational migrants into different categories, such as skilled or unskilled workers, skills migration or investor migration.
Foreign residents will, for the first time, take part in a national census due to begin on November 1, giving experts and policy-makers more solid statistical support for a reform of migration management.
"China must further adapt to the change from a source of outbound migrants into a recipient of inbound migrants and seize the time to optimize its migration legal framework," said Huang Xing, deputy director of the CASS Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.
As the country opened to the outside world and adopted economic reform in late 1970s, foreign expatriates have gradually gained more freedom.
In Beijing for instance, foreigners were mainly confined to a radius of 20 kilometers around Tiananmen Square until the mid-1980s. After fully opening to foreign tourists in 1995, Beijing lifted restrictions on foreigners' accommodation in 2003, allowing them to choose dwelling places freely.
(The author is a writer at Xinhua news agency.)
Unlike Western countries, which have special laws to regulate the management of transnational migrants, regulations only sporadically appeared in Chinese legal instruments concerning entry and exit administration, said Zhang Jijiao, a researcher with the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
The first and foremost Western experience worth noting is the classification of transnational migrants into different categories, such as skilled or unskilled workers, skills migration or investor migration.
Foreign residents will, for the first time, take part in a national census due to begin on November 1, giving experts and policy-makers more solid statistical support for a reform of migration management.
"China must further adapt to the change from a source of outbound migrants into a recipient of inbound migrants and seize the time to optimize its migration legal framework," said Huang Xing, deputy director of the CASS Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology.
As the country opened to the outside world and adopted economic reform in late 1970s, foreign expatriates have gradually gained more freedom.
In Beijing for instance, foreigners were mainly confined to a radius of 20 kilometers around Tiananmen Square until the mid-1980s. After fully opening to foreign tourists in 1995, Beijing lifted restrictions on foreigners' accommodation in 2003, allowing them to choose dwelling places freely.
(The author is a writer at Xinhua news agency.)
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