Creating Farmer Worker Records for Facilitating the Provision of Government Services: A Case from Sichuan Province, China

Abstract

Farmer workers constitute a unique social group in China. Due to the limitations of their rural hukou (hukou designates the household registration status of Chinese citizens), they often cannot take full advantage of government services compared to urban hukou holders, and the lack of authoritative documentation on their basic information, skills, and employment histories creates more barriers to their access to public services. Government institutions have thus proposed to create records for farmer workers to better facilitate their service utilization, but only few such projects exist and more empirical research is necessary for understanding them. This paper presents an empirical case study of the Sichuan Province’s government digital repository for farmer worker records. Based on a qualitative analysis of public information and data collected on-site in Sichuan, the paper presents a detailed account of the background, development trajectory, and challenges of the repository project. The analysis of the case yields three insights. First, building the repository as part of a larger business system to support business needs enables the improvement of services and the enhancement of records for farmer workers to stimulate each other. Second, the case’s approach to responsibility allocation in farmer worker records management illustrates the advantages of assigning the human resources and social security department as the leading department that handles main tasks. However, its circumvention of the complexities of region-based allocation also created other challenges. Third, farmer worker records projects can be immensely labor-intensive, and securing robust, consistent government support is crucial.