With the transformation of the Chinese government's main role from a "development-preoccupied" one to one focusing on improving people's livelihood, the country's floating population has undergone a change of status. From being restricted and regulated, the floating population is now being encouraged to better integrate into the local community.

The country has witnessed waves of concentrated population movement since the founding of New China in 1949. To bring these movements in line with the requirement of economic and social development, different policies and management methods have been adopted by the government in different historical periods. After decades of exploration and accumulation of experiences, the authorities now take it as a top priority to effectively promote integration of floating population with local dwellers when tailoring concrete policies and regulations on the management of the ever-growing group.

Currently, an overwhelming majority of the country's provinces and regions have adopted a security and social stability management model on the issue of floating population. Represented by Beijing and other economically booming provinces and metropolises, the model is mainly to maintain security and social order through promulgating a variety of rules and regulations targeted at immigrant populations. With local committees of political and legislative affairs being the main competent departments, such a management model has indeed improved services to inflowing non-native people. However, precautions against non-locals have also more or less exerted restrictions on their inflow. In today's society in which more and more economic interchanges between different regions have called for unblocked movement of populations among them, these limitations have not only become incompatible with the development of the times but are also contrary to the building of a harmonious society and people-first idea long advocated by the government.

The experience of past decades shows that migrant population has played an increasingly important role in promoting local economic and social development.

To break the bottleneck created by the slowly-progressing local industrial structural readjustment and the lack of much-needed talent and skilled workers, some regions have taken an experimental step towards developing a "Greater Population" concept in the effort to bring non-native population under their unified population management. Represented by Wuxi, a booming city in eastern Jiangsu province, the "Greater Population" formula aims to strengthen coordination among relevant responsible departments when considering provision of services to floating population. Such a model has changed the city's previous precaution-dominant mentality in dealing with the floating population issue and helped realize the transformation of its security management-oriented model to a comprehensive city layout and service management.

Obviously, the "Wuxi model" is a test of building a services-oriented government and marks the city's substantial step towards promoting a free transfer of populations to facilitate development of the local economy. However, the "Greater Population" model lacks a much-needed authoritative high-level department to coordinate and communicate policies on the management of floating population, thus discounting the local government's working efficiency on this issue.

Different from the Beijing and Wuxi models, Jiaxing, in Zhejiang province, has set up a special department to strengthen management of the floating population. With a special permanent body, which is mainly in charge of collection of information on the city's floating population, to deal with daily affairs related with the group, Jiaxing has laid down special policies and regulation on newcomers and pushed for reforms of its long-established residence system which usually denies floating populations the same treatment that their local counterparts enjoy. Under the new policies and management ideas, the local authorities extend to floating populations different residence certificates and different welfare treatments according to their concrete conditions.

Similar to the role of the Citizenship and Immigration Services in the United States, the special and standing department in Jiaxing aims to some extent to meet the demand of the accelerated population movement in contemporary society. However, the newly-established agency is only a coordination body and greater efforts are still needed.

In addition to some useful exploration of the reforms on floating population's services and management by local governments in member states, the European Union also offers us experiences in this aspect. The EU has an explicit policy target - to promote immigrants' integration in a local society - to ensure immigrants in any EU member state enjoy full rights in movement and residence, employment, family reunion and children's education as well as in politics and social security. The bloc also has an effective social integration and coordinative system in place to monitor member states' work in this regard and help coordinate their management over immigrants.

Since its floating population continues to expand along with the country's economic and social development, China should gradually promote their integration with local communities and try to improve their livelihood as a top priority. This is in accordance with the country's "people first" management ideology as well as an objective requirement to improve the country's policy on floating population integration under new conditions.

China should actively implement the residence certificate system and try to gradually meet their multi-stratum demands, ranging from their basic livelihood demand at the initial stage to higher-level welfare demands.

Also, policies and legislation aimed at strengthening the integration of floating populations with local residents should be drafted and a special supervisory body be established to monitor the process.

The author is with the Beijing School of Administration.

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