Is China Abolishing the Hukou System?*

In recent years, China has instituted a variety of reforms to its hukou system, an institution with the power to restrict population mobility and access to state-sponsored benefits for the majority of China’s rural population. A wave of newspaper stories published in late 2005 understood the latest round of reform initiatives to suggest that the hukou is set to be abolished, and that rural residents will soon be ‘‘granted urban rights.’’ This article clarifies the basic operations of the hukou system in light of recent reforms to examine the validity of these claims. We point out that confusion over the functional operations of the hukou system and the nuances of the hukou lexicon have contributed to the overstated interpretation of the initiative. The cumulative effect of these reforms is not abolition of the hukou, but devolution of responsibility for hukou policies to local governments, which in many cases actually makes permanent migration of peasants to cities harder than before. At the broader level, the hukou system, as a major divide between the rural and urban population, remains potent and intact. The Chinese household registration system (hukou 户口 or huji 户籍), having passed its 50th birthday this year, has had a significant impact on many aspects of life for people living in the People’s Republic. Today it is quite common for students of China to consider the hukou, along with gender, age and income, as one of the main variables defining exogenous constraints on individual behaviour in social and economic studies. In comparison with the residence recording systems bearing the same name in Taiwan or Japan, the Chinese system serves far more important functions, broadly dividing citizens into two classes for a variety of purposes essential to the function of the state and seriously affecting the livelihood of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. Under this system, some 800 million rural residents are treated as inferior second-class citizens deprived of the right to settle in cities and to most of the * We are thankful for useful comments and suggestions by Cai Fang, Carolyn Cartier, Wing-shing Tang, Jack Williams, Li Zhang and especially Dorothy Solinger, who read earlier versions of the manuscript. Assistance with romanization of Chinese titles by Qingfang Wang is also appreciated. The work described in this article was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CUHK4611/05H). 1 For example, Kam Wing Chan, Ta Liu and Yunyan Yang, ‘‘Hukou and non-hukou migration: comparisons and contrasts,’’ International Journal of Population Geography, Vol. 5, No. 6 (1999) pp. 425–48. Youqin Huang and William Clark, ‘‘Housing tenure choice in transitional urban China: a multi-level analysis,’’ Urban Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2002), pp. 7–32. Zhiqiang Liu, ‘‘Institution and inequality: the hukou system in China,’’ Journal of Comparative Economics, No. 33 (2003), pp. 133– 57. 582 # The China Quarterly, 2008 doi:10.1017/S0305741008000787 basic welfare and government-provided services enjoyed by urban residents, ranging from small benefits like being able to buy a city bus pass, to much more important matters such as enrolling their children in public schools in cities where their parents work. The system also keeps peasants out ofmany urban jobs, except for those considered ‘‘dirty,’’ dangerous or very low-paying. China’s longstanding policy of ‘‘incomplete urbanization,’’ as practised in the reformera, allows peasants to move to the city but denies them permanent residency rights andmany of the associated social benefits. As is well established, the hukou system is a cornerstone of China’s infamous rural–urban ‘‘apartheid,’’ creating a system of ‘‘cities with invisible walls.’’ It is a major source of injustice and inequality, perhaps the most crucial foundation of China’s social and spatial stratification, and arguably contributes to the country’s most prevalent human rights violations. From at least the mid-1990s, journalists have been interpreting official statements on ‘‘reforms’’ of the hukou system as presaging an end to the system as we know it. For example, as early as February 1994, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post published an article entitled ‘‘Registration system set to be abolished,’’ reporting a Chinese proposal to drop the classification of agricultural and non-agricultural populations. Many other pieces carrying similar messages were published in the Hong Kong and Western press between 1994 and early 2005. These messages seem to be consistent with hundreds of 2 Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). It should also be noted that a few previous state-provided privileges are no longer granted to urban residents. In some cities or city districts, migrant children can go to urban public schools, but most of them have to pay school fees several times higher than local residents. 3 A telling hypothetical example of what a rural migrant worker will typically face is given in Fei-Ling Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 4 Kam Wing Chan, ‘‘The fundamentals of China’s urbanization and policy,’’ The China Review, forthcoming. 5 Peter Alexander and Anita Chan, ‘‘Does China have an apartheid pass system?’’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (2004), pp. 609–29; Tim Luard, ‘‘China rethinks peasant ‘apartheid’,’’ BBC News, 10 November 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4424944.stm, accessed 3 April 2006; Kam Wing Chan, Cities with Invisible Walls: Reinterpreting Urbanization in Post-1949 China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press 1994). 6 See Fei-Ling Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion, p. xiii. In addition, it has been a source of corruption for local officials approving hukou conversions. Yu Depeng, Chengxiang shehui: cong geli zouxiang kaifang (Urban–Rural Society: From Segmentation to Openness) (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 2002), pp. 56–57. 7 Li Yi, Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification (University Press of America, 2005). Fei-Ling Wang, Organizing through Division and Exclusion, tables 5.7 and 5.8. John Knight and Lina Song, The Rural–Urban Divide: Economic Disparities and Interactions in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Xiaogang Wu and Donald J. Treiman, ‘‘The household registration system and social stratification in China: 1955–1996,’’ Demography, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2004) pp. 363–84. Dorothy Solinger, ‘‘The creation of a new underclass in China and its implications,’’ Environment & Urbanization, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2006), pp. 177–93. 8 South China Morning Post (International Weekly), 5 February 1994, p. 7. 9 Examples: Ming Pao (Hong Kong) carried an article on 21 June 1996 with a similar title: ‘‘Xiayue qi quxiao chengxiang huji chabie’’ (‘‘Urban–rural huji differences to be eliminated next month’’). More recently, similar articles appeared in Singtao Daily (Hong Kong-based, Overseas Edition) on 3 July 2003 and 8 March 2005, in South China Morning Post on 13 December 2002 and 12 February 2003, and in The New York Times, ‘‘China eases rules binding people to birth regions,’’ 23 October 2001. Is China Abolishing the Hukou System? 583