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Q: Hukou Questions, can anyone help?
My girlfriend is divorced and has a wonderful daughter. If we were to get married is there a way that my girlfriend can change her hukou to wherever I decide to work in the future? What about her daughter’s hukou?
11 years 11 weeks ago in Visa & Legalities - China
changing the hukou for a large city will be damn near impossible , the smaller the city , the easier this could be done.
ohChina:
Internal passport system. I read it somewhere that says it's adopted by the CCP from Soviet Russia. Used as a tool to bind people to where they're born. It creates huge unfairness between the urban residents and rural residents, between smaller cities residents and big cities residents. China's industry development is also a bloody robbery of the poor peasants. They got exploited to death, endured so much pain and poverty in their life time, and got considered as "incompetent," "low quality" "burden of the country". Yeah of course they are low quality.......as long as the govt keeps exploiting them and never invest in their education....
It also creates huge unfairness in education resource distribution, especially the opportunities to get in good universities. Central govt collects tax from everyone in the country and only invest in some best universities which are located in big cities. And they only enroll their locals... This move tears the Chinese society apart and makes Chinese young people who are from the discriminated provinces stop loving this country and start loving America and the other parts of the west, where their citizens at least get this education opportunity equality regardless of which province or state their hukous belong to, family wealth factor set aside.
ambivalentmace:
confucious did not like farmers either, just a coincidence i suppose.
If your girlfriend is divorced, changing the hukou will require the fathers consent, AND that will cost money...
change of hukou is usually just possible if you have achieved something meaningful (like filing a patent). marriage with a laowai does not entitle you to change the hukou.
I have been told that if I marry a Chinese woman (she) and I could have as many children as we want. How is it that a Chinese woman can easily have more than 1 child by marring a foreigner, but she can’t change her dammed legal address?
Yes I know there is no logic in China, but is the “logic” that our children would most likely be registered as Americans? Realistically no foreigner would ever register their child as a Chinese citizen, but could a foreigner register more than one child to Chinese citizenship?
We are both in our 40’s so we have no real intentions of having a child, although my GF would love to have another one. I am a whole lot more practical than this, but if it happened would I really be stuck living in her province forever, because of my GF hukou?
I am also under the impression that if you purchase a home/apartment she could then change her hukou to that new address. Is this correct or incorrect? I have no intentions of living in any city above tier 3 or 4 so the cost of a home could be fairly affordable.
I have asked several Chinese friends questions about hukou and it is literally amazing how many different answers you can get. Usually these questions revolve around having a second home in their village, but still I never get the same answer.
Where does one find real information on this subject and I don’t mean Wikipedia type answers. Would a college law professor have real knowledge about such things?
Any input is appreciated – thanks in advance
mikael84:
Yes, it is because your 2. or 3. child will only be registered as an American that she can have more than 1 child.
Someone told me there isn't a Chinese translation for logic. Not sure if they were being serious or not, but...
hi
If I may ask, how old is the daughter? It matters because if she still needs to go to high school and take college entrance exam, then it's a big deal. If she wouldn't take the college entrance exam the hukou is pretty much useless in most time.
Like My comment to one answer above, Hukou, technically as "internal passport system", is a tool adopted by the govt to control its people, and intentionally create social unfairness. So the good cities don't have to share their advantages and resource with the worse cities.
Different people give you different answers about how to change hukou location, because the policies vary a lot in different cities. You are a foreigner and I don't think you have better "network" in China than your girlfriend has. Everything is possible. One child policy is there, yes. But with proper "relation" with the proper person, it's just a matter of money. say 30,000 Yuan to legalize a second child as Chinese citizen, regardless of the child having foreign or Chinese parents.
I actually never heard anyone in her 40s still want to change his or her hukou unless it's for the child's sake. And what hukou matters to the child is the education resource distribution, more specifically, it's if your hukou is in a good place like Beijing Shanghai you get way easier to go to the best universities. If your hukou is in Henan or Shandong it sucks so much.
Many cities have the policy that if someone buys an apartment there, he/she can get the hukou. But again, it depends on where it is. In "good" cities like Beijing, you can't buy an apartment if you don't have a Beijing hukou. WTF. yes this is China. I myself got discriminated by this hukou crap system as well.
PS: don't worry too much. I think it's not very difficult because you are not planning to get her and the daughter a hukou in Beijing or Shanghai, Tianjin etc. It's relatively easier in the smaller, 3rd or 4th tier cities. Yet again, it means the hukou there isn't worth much.
My girlfriend had her daughter very late in life so her daughter is preteen and there are at least 6 more years of school unless she skips a grade. She will definitely go to college too so her hukou is a bit of a problem. I was kind of hoping to bounce all over China for the next 5 years, but my girlfriend’s daughter’s hukou is going to put a stop to that. Short of living in the same province for a real long time I am not real sure how to solve my dilemma.
That’s just one hukou problem. The other is if we marry and I stay her indefinitely I would prefer to live in country. Since my girlfriend was married, she has told me, she supposedly can’t live in her childhood village anymore. Others have told me this isn’t the case so not sure who to believe. I don’t think anyone is intentionally giving me bad information, I just think that most people have no clue about what the law really is.
It still seems hard to believe that China would let a Chinese woman married to a foreigner, have more than one child, but make the whole family live in the same province where the child from a previous marriage was born. Yet, this is China and common sense doesn’t have much value her.
mikael84:
I would assume she cannot live in her childhood village anymore because of loss of face for being married twice.
ou812,
We tried to get a marriage visa for me since my wife is a Chinese citizen. The PSB said this is only available if we live in her remote village, and they'll cancel it if we move. When we told them she goes to school in Changsha, and that we want to live there, the Changsha PSB guy threw my passport towards us and refused.
However, you should still be able to move with her if you're working. Just pay the correct bribes if necessary, and ask the right people about going to school outside the province. My wife and I are able to go anywhere in the country, but she's pretty much done with school now.
Hulk:
I should add, we can go anywhere without paying bribes. We've already toured a large swath of the country, and have moved far away from her province. I was just thinking that you may have to pay bribes to get her daughter in school, but maybe not. I do know you can move anywhere, though.
