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.
