As freezing temperatures arrived in northern China, many urban residents found they were being billed for their house heating this year due to an ongoing welfare system reform.

For years, urban residents working in state-owned enterprises or governmental organizations lived in apartments belonging to their work units, who paid the house heating fee during the winter period.

A major reform since the 1990s gradually ruled out further welfare housing distribution and work units started to sell the property rights of residential homes to their staff, but they still pay most of the heating bill.

Now individuals rather than work units own over 80 per cent of urban apartments including many commercial apartments, official figures show.

The gradual vanishing of welfare houses, which were sold to workers and staff at lower-than-cost prices, has made the annual heating fee collection a serious problem, especially when almost all the residential buildings are each heated by a central heating system.

Under the former welfare housing distribution system, it was easy for a work unit to pay for the heating because all the residents in a building were all its staff.

Since the housing distribution reform, some apartments formerly owned by work units now belong to individual householders who rent them to migrant workers, so the work units refuse to pay the fee. Some state-owned enterprises, especially in northeastern cities, face severe financial difficulties and can not afford the heating fee.

In many places, work units began to make homeowners pay for heating but some residents chose not to pay since they still regarded it as something owed them rather than their own responsibility.

"I am still not used to paying 1,500 yuan (US $180 ) for one year's heating fee," said a worker of a state-owned publishing company in Beijing.

Even some people living in commercial apartments refused to pay because they thought the temperature of heating provided was not of high quality.

The residents of the Baihuayuan residential area of Jinan, capital city of Shandong province in east China, owed 234,000 yuan to the heating company last year.

The failure to collect fees led to serious financial crises of heating providers and their worsening services made more people reluctant to pay.

People have to change their traditional thoughts that heating should be free, said Pan Yun, an official with the Prices Bureau in Jinan.

Other experts argued that although residents began to pay for heating, the state-owned heating providers still monopolized the market so a competitive heating market has not been established.

Problems make reforms inevitable and urgent. The Ministry of Construction has issued a notice calling to stop free heating and to make heating service a commodity that could be exchanged by currency.

Under the new system, heating consumption will be measured by individual families and the work unit will give some subsidy to their staff who are responsible to pay all the fee.

No householders will be allowed to use free heating, and state- owned, private and joint-stock companies will be encouraged to bid to engage in heating supply, sources with the Ministry of Construction said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 20, 2003)