As an unprecedented wave of strikes rolled across China this month – shutting car plants and electronics component makers – the staff at the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Beijing decided they, too, had had enough.

For the past 10 months, construction worker Wang Jianquan has been travelling back and forth between his home in rural Gansu and Beijing in the hope of getting wages he says he is owed. "They owe me three months' pay," the 36-year-old migrant worker said. "But I'm afraid to go back to the construction site because when we went before, they beat us."

Dozens of villages in outer Beijing are due to be demolished to make way for new developments. But the migrant workers and young graduates who live there will get zero compensation for being made homeless. Photo of Tangjialing village.

Hu Zhongping dreams that one day his young sons may go to university and escape his life of casual manual labour. The aspiration seems increasingly unrealistic. Right now, he would settle for them going to school. Chinese children are entitled to a state education, but not all of them get one. And the tens of millions born to migrant workers like Hu are among the most vulnerable, owing to a registration system that divides the country's citizens into rural and urban dwellers, and dictates their rights accordingly.

Momentum towards reform of China’s household registration (hukou) system seems to be growing in the build-up to this year’s National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s annual parliament, which opens at the end of this week. Zhou Yongkang, China’s most senior official in charge of public and state security, wrote in the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Seeking Truth (求是) that there was now an “urgent” need to reform the country’s anachronistic policy of dividing citizens into urban and rural residents, and explore new ways of managing internal migration.

Following the lead of Jiangsu, which announced a 12 percent increase in the minimum wage this month, several other municipalities have indicated they too will raise the minimum wage this year. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Dongguan have all separately indicated that the time is now right for an increase in the minimum wage, frozen by central government order on 17 November 2008.

When school reopens after the Spring Break in February, thousands of children of rural migrant workers in a Beijing district face having no classes to return to as their schools will have been demolished to make way for urban redevelopment. At least 6,000 students, among them young children of kindergarten age, would be affected after some 20 privately run migrant schools in Chaoyang District are torn down by the end of February, according to principals of the schools slated for demolition.

The number of workers filing grievances with the Beijing municipal authorities reached 80,000 by the end of November, nearly double the number last year, according to a local trade union official.

The death of Chen Guojun at the hands of angry workers at the Tonghua Steel works on 24 July prompted a flurry of comment and speculation in the Chinese media. There was one issue however that everyone seemed to agree on; namely the need to better protect the rights and interests of workers during the process of state-owned enterprise reform - the only question that remained was how.

In July 2009, Zhang Haichao voluntarily underwent an operation to open up his chest in order to prove he was suffering from the fatal lung disease pneumoconiosis. Photograph of Zhang by Yanzhou Metropolis Daily