Household Registration System (Menghe)
The Household Registration System, also well-known by its Menghean name hojŏk (호적 / 戶籍), is a system of household registration which exists in Menghe to track citizens' genealogical descent and area of residence. Hojŏk is issued at the level of the family, and includes a record of all births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and moves. It also functions as an internal passport or "local citizenship," defining each family as permanent residents of a specific county-level unit and restricting county-level rights and services to those with local hojŏk.
Because household registration is very difficult to change, people living outside their county of origin face limited access to public services that require local hojŏk status, including welfare, public education, and access to subsidized medical care. Over the course of the Menghean economic miracle, tens of millions of rural residents migrated to the cities to seek work, and without local hojŏk they effectively live as second-class citizens. In recent years, the Menghean government has expressed a commitment to reforming the household registration system, but intends to do so through a gradual relaxation of the requirements to change one's locality rather than a full abolition of the system as such.
History
Early household registers
Even before the emergence of the Meng Dynasty in 192 BCE, several Menghean kingdoms made attempts to record the lineage and root location of individual households, though early records were often incomplete and generally limited to the nobility. Emperor Sŏngmyŏng established a wider network of county-level family registers during his reign (118-92 BCE), a policy which involved requiring that all commoners under Meng administration adopt patrilineal surnames based on Gomun characters. This record-keeping system allowed the central government to assess taxes and conscription, which were the duties of individual families, and to punish particularly severe crimes by executing the criminal's immediate and distant relatives.
Subsequent dynasties, especially the Ŭi and Myŏn, expanded on the household register system by using it to control internal population movements. Ŭi policy, which was mainly intended to prevent overwork of the land, was actually more restrictive of urban movement to the countryside than rural movement to the cities, a configuration which led to the growth of large population centers along key trade routes. The Myŏn dynasty added much stronger requirements tying rural families to their areas of residence, in part to avoid renewed outbreaks of the Menghean Black Plague.
During the modern era
Myŏn policy laid the groundwork for the household registration systems used in the 20th century. The State of Sinŭi set up a particularly expansive registration and control system in order to prevent the rural population from evading conscription and taxation as the government worked to fund its on-and-off civil war for control over the country. Similarly, the Greater Menghean Empire used population registration to ensure that all families contributed adequately to the Pan-Septentrion War and to root out possible dissidents and draft shirkers. During these periods, however, the main aim of household registration related to taxation rather than migration control.
In the postwar period, the Allied Occupation Authority and the Republic of Menghe that followed it viewed population control as one of their main goals, an outlook which led them to legalize abortion and send urban residents displaced by Allied bombing back into the countryside. In order to avoid renewed migration into the cities, which could lead to unemployment, famine, and therefore support for Communist movements, both governments forbade citizens with household registration in one county from traveling elsewhere in the country without the approval of the local government. During the Menghean War of Liberation, the Republic of Menghe Army used regular internal passport checks as part of its effort to crack down on arms smugglers and Communist guerillas moving around the countryside, in some cases resorting to summary executions of military-age males found outside their county of residence.
Household registration in the DPRM
As one of its promises during the War of Liberation, the Menghean People's Communist Party had vowed to abolish the restrictive migration control measures imposed by the RoMA and the Allied Occupation Authority. After the war's end, however, a majority of the central Party leadership, supported by General-Secretary Sun Tae-jun, decided to retain a less heavy-handed version of the policy. Thirty years of mobilization, insurgency, and war had devastated the urban economy, and while the MPCP renounced the extreme population control measures of the Republic period, Party leaders nevertheless feared that uncontrollable migration could place too much strain on their new administrative system.
The eventual compromise was to allow temporary movement around the country, but to tie access to the state-controlled welfare system to one's area of residence. Ration cards, whether for food or other commodities, were only redeemable in one's home county, and cash was scarce. National law also forbade state-owned enterprises and local government agencies from hiring workers with out-of-county household registration. Both of these policies became more restrictive under Sim Jin-hwan, who expanded both the ration-based welfare system and the state-controlled industrial sector. At the same time, Sim allowed each city to issue a limited number of residency-change applications each year, in order to feed his urban-centric industrialization scheme.
The latter option halted under Ryŏ Ho-jun, who saw agrarian Communism as his ideological end goal. During the 1980s, household registration effectively shifted to the town and village level, at the time known as the commune level. Lower-level registration was supposed to reduce bureaucratic bloat in the welfare and employment management systems, and it also prevented farmers from evading Ryŏ's increasingly unpopular collectivization policy. This intensified the death toll of the Menghean famine of 1985-87, as survivors fleeing the hardest-hit areas were denied food in the cities and could be rounded up and shipped back to their communes.
1987-present
Like the post-liberation government of Sun Tae-jun, the new regime which emerged from the Decembrist Revolution was divided on what to do about the DPRM-era household registration system. Some reformists favored eliminating it entirely, especially in recognition of its role in intensifying the famine and re-ruralizing the population. Yet more skeptical officials shared the early Communists' fear that unchecked migration into the cities could intensify food shortages and generate instability. Choe Sŭng-min ultimately sided with the latter group, and the household registration system remained in place.
A particular conundrum in the heady reform years of the 1990s was how to keep urban migration at an appropriate level. Like Sim Jin-hwan, Choe and his reformist allies saw urban industrialization as the vanguard of economic growth, and knew that new factories and workshops in the coastal cities would need a steady stream of cheap labor from the interior in order to maximize growth. At the same time, they saw the slum cities of Khalistan and Maracaibo as a serious problem to be avoided at all costs, not only because of their poor living conditions but also because they were hard to police and administer. Part of Choe's favored solution was an enormous campaign to build public housing, but Socialist Party officials also pursued an ambiguous enforcement strategy whereby internal migrants were generally not deported back to their home villages, but they could be denied access to key local services. Choe and the reformists also believed that this balance would create a more flexible labor force, as working-age men and women moving to the cities would leave their extended families "anchored" at home rather than bringing relatives to the cities; thus, urban labor force participation would be high, and if the local labor supply exceeded the formal economy's demand, working-age migrants could more easily return to relatives in their hometowns.
Formal laws on household registration remained unchanged up until the late 2000s, as urban governments relied mainly on changes in enforcement to respond to changes in the supply of migrant workers. Yet as the years passed, all of Menghe's major cities accumulated a large "underclass" of internal migrant workers who lacked local household registration and faced precarious legal and social status. This became a major source of unrest, especially under a government nominally committed to equality and increased standards of living. Gradually, the MSP began efforts to improve the status of urban migrant workers and widen the path for changing one's household registration. The largest change came in November 2017, when the 20th NSCC passed a resolution recommending that the national government lay out a timetable for decoupling local residency and access to services. Choe Sŭng-min signed off on the proposal, but the government has thus far opted for gradual and experimental reform, out of concern that sudden changes in household registration policy could trigger a flash migration into the most attractive cities.
Overview and description
Under Menghe's Household Registration System, each citizen is assigned hojŏk status in a county-level entity - i.e., either a county (gun), a minor city (si), or a district (gu) of a major city. Since 1995, this information has been recorded electronically in one's Resident Identity Card, eliminating the need for residents to carry a separate household registration document. Strictly speaking, it is not illegal to reside in a different county from the one in which one holds hojŏk, and police and internal security forces do not detain internal migrants, but lacking local registration denies a household access to certain rights and privileges.
Relationship to social services
The hojŏk system's restriction on migration operates mainly through its relationship to social welfare services, most of which are distributed at the county level. Under national law, citizens can only access certain services in the county or city where they hold household registration, a holdover from the system which Sim Jin-hwan developed. An exception exists for municipalities and directly-controlled cities, where citizens with household registration in one of the city's composite districts or counties can access social services in other districts and counties within the city.
Current law (as of 2017) ties hojŏk residency to voting, real estate ownership, regular medical care, and education: parents can only send their children to school in a county-level division where one or both parents are classified as residents. After the age of 68, elderly citizens must reside in their county of registration for at least 10 months per year in order to continue drawing from their state pension funds, and unemployed citizens can only collect two months of unemployment insurance while out-of-county.
Earlier on, the list of services restricted by one's legal residence was much more extensive. In the early 1990s, before hojŏk reforms were rolled out, internal migrants also lacked access to subsidized emergency medical care, ration cards, and public housing. Current public housing policy, rolled out in 2001, allows migrants to apply for public housing but gives citizens with local registration priority when empty apartments are allocated.
Acquiring and changing household registration
Originally, household registration was purely patrilineal; a wife took on her husband's household registration on marriage, and a child of either sex inherited household registration from their father. A revision to the law passed in 2002 allowed husbands to take on their wife's household registration instead. Either way, one spouse can and must change their household registration upon obtaining a marriage certificate. The marriage certificate itself establishes the couple as a new "household," even if they live separately or with their parents and thus do not meet the term's technical definition. Unmarried but cohabitating couples cannot make such a change.
A domestically-born citizen's hojŏk status is assigned at birth and is based on the hojŏk status of the child's parents, irrespective of the location of birth. Children born out of wedlock obtain the hojŏk status of whichever parent is designated as their primary legal guardian. If a child is adopted before reaching the age of majority, he or she obtains the new legal guardian household's hojŏk. As late as the 1980s, a child born out of wedlock or to an unknown father could end up without any household registration, a problem patched over by subsequent reforms.
After passing the age of majority (19 Standard years in Menghe) an individual can apply to change the administrative unit in which their household is legally registered. This involves a lengthy application and review process, in which household members collectively must demonstrate proof of a stable future income and "skills or knowledge of value to the local society." The exact content of this requirement varies from one local government to another, and is generally stricter in large cities. If the application is approved, all members of the legally registered household attain full rights as residents of their new area of residence, but lose their original rights in their former home county.
Relation to citizenship
For foreign nationals who naturalize as Menghean citizens, the process for obtaining hojŏk is somewhat different. Foreign nationals who naturalized through the mainstream process are recognized as a new household and obtain household registration in the administrative unit where they spent a majority of their last five years in Menghe. Foreign spouses of Menghean nationals obtain household registration matching that of their Menghean spouse, and individuals who qualify for an expedited path to citizenship due to their current or former Menghean relatives obtain the household registration that their closest Menghean relative has or had. In cases where none of these conditions apply, the individual is granted household registration in the county, city, or district where they naturalized.
Ongoing reforms
Beginning in the mid-to-late 2000s, the Menghean government began working toward a reform of the Household Registration System, with the aim of reducing the pressure on internal migrants living outside their area of birth. The government has been reluctant to abolish the system in its entirety, however, out of concern that this could too rapidly accelerate migration into major cities. Instead, the general direction of reform has been to gradually loosen the valve on migration by decoupling household registration from welfare and making it easier to change one's area of residence.
Streamlined re-registration
Formally, a procedure to change one's locality of household registration does exist, but its restrictive nature means that most rural-to-urban migrants are unable to attain formal residency status in their host city. One major direction for household registration reform has been to streamline the procedure for re-applying and reduce the requirements involved. Informally, several cities pursued this approach from around 2010 onward, increasing their yearly ceilings for hojŏk conversion and allowing broader categories of workers to meet application requirements.
The Household Registration Reform Proposal laid out by the 20th National Social Consultative Conference recommended extending a similar approach to the national level, with the aim of eventually abolishing all legal restrictions on internal migration. Although the NSCC lacks the power to pass binding legislation in Menghe, Choe Sŭng-min expressed strong support for the proposal, and on National Day in 2018 the National Assembly released a formal timetable for the implementation of hojŏk reform.
Decoupling from welfare
Another arm of the same strategy has been to loosen the connection between local residence and access to social welfare services. After a high-profile 2007 case in which a migrant mother was denied emergency medical care for her 4-year-old child, resulting in the latter's death, the National Assembly amended the national guidelines on medical care to allow citizens to seek emergency treatment at any facility, irrespective of their region of household registration. The State Pension System implemented in 2009 also centralized pension accounting at the national level, allowing workers to collect credit for their pension accounts from jobs held outside their area of residence.
Even so, there is much future room for improvement. As of 2018, routine medical checkups are only covered by state insurance if conducted in one's area of household residence, and children can only attend public school in their household's area of registration. The National Assembly's 2018 timetable has identified medical care decoupling as a leading priority, setting it for 2021, though some limits on public school attendance will remain in place and instead be addressed through easier re-registration.
Obstacles to further reform
In addition to bureaucratic inertia and concerns about the scale of unrestricted migration, reform of the household registration system also faces staunch opposition from legal urban residents. The granting of equal rights and privileges to internal migrants would create much greater competition for large cities' schools, hospitals, and urban housing, which are better than facilities in the countryside and in the interior. Because the urban middle class is a key base of support for the reformist Menghe Socialist Party and a potential source of pro-democracy mobilization, local urban governments are highly sensitive to its needs, and are reluctant to move too aggressively in support of migrant rights.
Support for hojŏk reform is also inconsistent among internal migrants themselves. A much-debated survey conducted in 2014 found that 48% of internal migrants living in major cities would not change their household registration if permitted to do so, as hojŏk in a rural county of origin affords them certain benefits of its own. Most importantly, it allows them to own land in their county of origin, and return to it as a secondary source of income if the urban job market tightens. Some scholars have contested the accuracy of the survey, and in particular its sampling methods, but household registration in a rural home county does represent an important safety net for migrant workers.