My friend’s grandparents moved in to his Beijing apartment to avail of a cheaper dentist

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Chinese household registration system usually restricts citizens’ access to public services beyond their locality ...

It was to be a night different from all other nights because for the first time in the couple of years I have known him, my tight-fisted artist friend Song was going to pay for dinner. He had just sold a large painting for a good price and when he made the offer on the spur of the moment, naming a decent pizza place, I thought it was best that we meet the following day.

He was on alert from the moment we sat down and I could feel the tension rise as I turned the pages of the menu, past the pizza and pasta on to the meat and fish dishes that were twice the price. But the atmosphere eased after we agreed to share a pizza and a salad and when the waiter came to ask if I would like a second drink, Song shooed him away.

He had more than the picture sale to celebrate because a few days earlier, he had persuaded the landlord to cut his rent by 25 per cent, the third big reduction he has extracted from him in as many years.

“He had a brain haemorrhage and he was in hospital so he could only type short answers to my texts. In the end, he just said yes,” he said.

The landlord also said yes when Song asked if his mother, his grandmother and his grandfather could register temporarily at his address. The three of them had arrived from his hometown in northeast China a couple of weeks earlier and they were planning to stay for a while.

His grandparents, both in their mid-80s, had been talking for almost a year about coming to Beijing for dental treatment, which is better in the capital than in the down-at-heel rust belt they come from. But the hukou, or household registration, usually limits Chinese citizens’ access to services like public healthcare to their own province or city.

By shifting their hukou temporarily to Beijing, Song’s grandparents could see a dentist in Beijing for a quarter of the price they would pay if they were still registered outside the city. But when his grandfather had his first examination, the dentist delivered a stark verdict.

That was more or less all of…

So…

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