The State Council has rewritten the rules governing China's housing provident fund, the payroll savings scheme that employers and employees pay into together, and the changes take effect on 20 September. The decision was approved at the council's 93rd executive meeting on 31 July and carries Premier Li Qiang's signature dated 10 August; the amended regulation was republished on the 18th. It is the third revision since the regulation was issued in 1999, after 2002 and 2019.
The part people are reading is Article 24, which lists what a worker may draw the balance for. It now runs to nine grounds: paying rent; buying, building, rebuilding or making major repairs to a home you live in; repaying the principal and interest on a home loan; renovating a home you live in; paying property management fees on a home you live in; retirement; total loss of working capacity together with the end of the employment relationship; emigrating; and other housing-consumption situations the State Council approves. Three of those are new — renovation, property fees, and the open category at the end. A fourth line changed rather than appeared: withdrawing to pay rent used to require that the rent exceed a set share of household wage income, and that threshold is gone.
Two deadlines are written into the text. A fund management centre must decide a withdrawal application within three days of accepting it, and a loan application within ten. The regulation also now requires that contribution records be recognised across the country, and names transfers between cities and borrowing away from where you paid in as the business this is meant to make workable.
The scheme also opens to people who have never been inside it. Individual business operators, part-time workers and others in flexible employment may contribute voluntarily, with the detailed arrangements left to city-level governments and above. Against that, the enforcement side is tightened: anyone who withdraws by fraud or forged documents must return the money and is barred from withdrawing or borrowing for three years, and the bar runs to five years for a fraudulently obtained loan. Employers that fail to register or to open accounts for their staff now face a fine of 50,000 to 300,000 yuan, up from a range of 10,000 to 50,000. Deposit and lending rates for the fund are to be decided by the State Council.
For context on how busy this area already is, the China Index Academy's Chen Wenjing told 21st Century Business Herald that by 16 August local authorities had issued around 400 provident-fund measures this year — on the academy's own incomplete count, more than half of all new property policies in the same period.
Why it is on the board
Fifth on Weibo's hot-search list when we collected, four days after the text was published and a month before it binds anything.
The thing worth noticing is what the entry actually was. It was not the decision and not a news report: it was a video offering to explain the withdrawal rules in one sitting. A scheme most working people pay into every month, and the item that travelled was somebody telling them what they are now allowed to do with it.
확인: 中国政府网 · 21世纪经济报道