ABSTRACT
As early as the 1950s, workers at state-owned enterprises and urban collective enterprises were entitled to receive old-age security under the Chinese labor insurance system (CASS and Central Archives Bureau, 1994: 631–727). When economic reforms began at the end of the 1970s, this system was substantively transformed into corporate (enterprise-based) labor insurance. In the marketization process, this corporate pension system, which could hardly operate due to funding difficulties, was eventually replaced by the social old-age insurance system for urban employees. In most rural areas, however, the agricultural population, except households without an income source but entitled to the “five guaranteed benefits (food, cloth, medical care, housing, and burial),” has never been covered by the old-age security system. By the end of 2008, the total number of rural migrant workers totaled 225.42 million, including 140.41 million migrants working from their home counties (for the purposes of this chapter, it is interesting to note that 36 percent of them were female), but the number of participants in the basic old-age insurance was only 24.16 million (Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the National Bureau of Statistics, 2009). By taking the number of the migrants from their home counties as the base, the old-age insurance coverage rate was about 17.3 percent, the medical insurance coverage rate was nearly 30.4 percent (with 42.66 million participants), the work injury insurance coverage rate was 35.2 percent (with 49.42 million participants), and the unemployment insurance coverage rate was 11 percent (with 15.49 million participants). By taking the total number of rural migrant workers as the base, the above insurance coverage rates should have been lower by one-third.
