Birthplace should not hold children back
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Some 30 parents whose children do not have a Beijing hukou (permanent residency permit) started a journey "seeking justice" when they founded an organization on Saturday to lobby the government.
The group is calling for the abolition of the regulation that says only students with the document can take the university entrance examination in the capital.
The organization says it represents a huge number of non-native children who have been studying and living in Beijing for years but who have to return to their official hometowns to take the make-or-break exam.
"Our children live under the same sky as their Beijing counterparts, why can't they access the same educational resources," said Zhu Cheng, who was one of the initiators of the organization. "It is so unfair."
He said the organization will proactively collect public signatures, contact the media, conduct research and propose solutions to the government.
They are hoping the policy can be removed in two years.
"If none of the measures works, we will file a lawsuit against the government and the Ministry of Education, he said.
Beijing has the most abundant educational resources in the country and they are reserved for Beijing natives because the authorities fear there will be a sudden influx of people from other cities to the capital if the rules are removed.
The students' recruitment quota in other provinces is much lower than in Beijing. In 2009, Peking University admitted 286 liberal arts students from around 100,000 Beijing students while it enrolled only 98 students from Henan province, where 950,900 students passed the exam, according to Peking University website.
The data suggests one out of every 300 students from Beijing can study at the best school in China, while only one in 9,785 Henan students have the chance to study there.
In September 2009, Minister of Education Yuan Guiren set a goal of realizing equitable distribution of education resources by 2020 in his inauguration speech.
Jiao Huailing, a native from Liangshan city, Shandong province, is on edge whenever she talks about her daughter, who will soon return home to prepare for the exam.
"She has lived in Beijing all her life. My husband and I can't accompany her back because we have stable jobs here in Beijing," she said. "I am very worried about how she is supposed to take care of herself while preparing for this highly competitive examination."
Members of the organization suggested that in order to avoid a sudden influx of migrants but still ensure a more equitable distribution of education resources, the Beijing government could follow the lead of Shanghai and grant hukou to people who pay taxes and have stable jobs in the city for more than a certain number of years.
