IN HER parents’ bare brick-built shack in southern Beijing, Li Xue sifts through piles of court verdicts, petitions and other papers that record her family’s struggle for most of the 20 years of her life to secure a simple document: a household registration certificate, the basic building block of official identity in China. Because she was born in violation of China’s one-child-per-couple policy, local officials will not give her one. As a result she could not go to school. She now cannot get a job, nor get married, nor even buy a train or plane ticket. Despite recent moves to relax family-planning rules, the ordeal for Ms Li (pictured) is still far from over.

Officials reckon there are about 13m Chinese who lack the certificates, known as hukou. (Being without official documents is not only a problem in China—see article.) A hukou is needed to obtain an identity card as well as to prove residency in order to qualify for admission to state-run schools and access to subsidised health care. More than 250m people who have migrated from the countryside into cities lack local hukou for the places to which they have moved, making it similarly difficult for them to use education and health-care services. But they do at least have rural-issued hukou and, therefore, identity cards. Ms Li is known colloquially in Chinese as a heihu, literally meaning “black hukou”. It means she barely has any legal identity at all. She cannot, on her own, even enter the law courts where her battles for hukou are fought. She has to use her sister’s library card to borrow the books she needs to help her.

Most of the heihu (sometimes also known as “black children”, the word black connoting illegal in Chinese) are people like Ms Li, victims of China’s strict family-planning regulations. Her poor, handicapped, parents (both holders of urban Beijing hukou) already had one child, but say they continued with the second pregnancy because of a doctor’s advice that aborting the foetus would endanger the mother’s health. They could not afford to pay the fine of 5,000 yuan ($800 at today’s rate), which at the time was the equivalent of about six years’ income for her father. Fines are set by local governments and are often pegged at three or more times the parents’ annual earnings. If the parents fail to pay, the child usually gets no hukou. The central government issued a notice in 1988 saying that local governments were not allowed to deny hukou to such children. But it was clearly far keener on limiting births than on enforcing such a rule.

Recently the central government has begun to relax a little. In November it announced that urban couples could have two children if just one of the parents was an only child. Several provincial-level governments, including Beijing’s, have since revised their regulations to comply. In December the central government declared that 100m rural migrants would be given urban hukou by 2020. This year the eastern province of Shandong and also Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province in the south, have announced that heihu children can get the coveted document with only a birth certificate. Xinhua, a government news agency, says Shandong has given them to 120,000 “black” children since February. It described the recent moves in Shandong and Nanchang to register such children as “a radical change in policy which may put an end to the misery of millions of unregistered people”.

But the authorities in most other places appear in no rush to follow suit. Ms Li speculates that they might be worried about opening the floodgates to lawsuits by people like her who have suffered for so long. In January her nearby police station, which is responsible for issuing hukou documents, told a local court that her demand for nearly 2.4m yuan in compensation had “no legal basis”. The court dismissed her case. She has recently filed another, similar, one and is awaiting a response.

Never give up

Ms Li and her parents appear undeterred by occasional monitoring of their movements by people they believe are plainclothes police, and by the installation of a closed-circuit television camera pointed at their door. (Ms Li’s brushes with the law go back to when, aged 11, she was briefly detained for displaying a placard near Tiananmen Square that read “I want to go to school”.) Ms Li uses social media to raise awareness of the heihu problem. The name of her account on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, translates as “Little Xue never gives up”. Too poor to hire a lawyer, Ms Li teaches herself the law. It is the profession she says she would choose if only she were allowed to work.