Chinese scholars have called for a change in the voting system to allow people to vote according to where they live as opposed to where they are registered.

Many migrant workers now live in cities far from where they registered as residents.

"To use residence registration to determine where a villager can vote was feasible in the past when rural farmers, land and residences were relatively fixed," said Xu Yong, a professor from the rural studies center of east China's elite Normal University.

"But great, earth-shake changes have taken place in the countryside. Millions of farmer peasants have flocked to the cities to work and many elders settle in the countryside after retirement," he said. "That makes the registration no longer suitable to decide where villagers can vote."

"Villagers have the right to directly elect or oust their village heads and members of the village committees, but as the Organic Law of Village Committees does not clearly define voters' rights, disputes and even mass protests have occurred in some village elections, which have disrupted the stability in the rural areas," said Prof. Yuan Dayi of the Beijing Administrative College at an ongoing symposium supported by the EU-China training program on village governance in Beijing.

The 140 million migrant workers who have worked and lived in the cities for more than a decade, still play the role of "an outsider" because their residence is registered back in the countryside.

At the fourth session of the 10th National People's Congress (NPC), 31 deputies proposed to revise the Organic Law of Village Committees. In the proposal, deputies set forth the issued of defining the village voters, setting up a village election law and improving the assembly of the village deputies system.

At present, the Ministry of Civil Affairs is studying and drafting the revised Organic Law of Village Committees and planning to submit it to the NPC, China's top legislature.

(Xinhua News Agency April 10, 2006)