A GROWING number of census takers have quit since the national campaign started Monday in the face of great difficulties when making home visits, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported, quoting officials.
The paper quoted an official with a community work station in Futian District as saying that as many as 30 percent of the community s census takers had quit. Many census takers had complained that they had been denied entry when making home visits. They looked [at us] suspiciously even though we had shown them our work ID, said one man who identified himself only as Zhang in Nanshan District.
It feels like you are being rejected and it hurts, he said after being denied entry to many households.
Another census taker in a Luohu District community said she had visited one household eight times but still could not get in. It s just too difficult. I didn t think I could make it so I quit, she said.
Most Shenzhen residents are cautious and keep a distance from other people because it was a migrant city. According to my observation, it is hard to build trust between people in the city, not like Beijing and Shanghai where it is easy to close the distance with people, Luo said.
The Futian official said they were short of hands but it was really difficult to recruit new census takers. We have to work with universities, hoping to employ students for the census, he said.
The city has a large number of migrant workers, making it more challenging to conduct the census than in other cities, the paper said. It is the first time the census has counted people where they live, not where they are registered.
Residents have also become less cooperative in sharing personal details as they become increasingly aware of their rights to privacy. Although census takers are sworn to confidentiality, residents are suspicious that the information they give could be misused or leaked.
Earlier media reports said a census taker had been threatened at knife point in a Longgang housing estate late last month.
Strict requirements in filling in the census forms were also driving some census workers away.
A form with five corrections would be regarded as invalid, according to a national census rule. It is really time and energy-consuming to fill in a form, said Zhang. We have to be extremely careful in filling in the form or we have to start another form which takes much longer.
Census takers said they were exhausted after a night of home visits. There is just too much information to be filled in, said another census taker named Ren.
Some quit on just the second day, the Futian official said.
About 6 million census takers are being deployed nationwide from Monday to next Wednesday to account for more than 1.3 billion people in the first census since 2000. It is the sixth national census conducted in China.
Under the existing household registration system, known as hukou, citizens are designated as either urban or rural. Migrant workers from the countryside are registered in their hometowns, not in the cities where many have lived for years.
(SD News)
