China’s Hukou System Is Stubbornly Resistant to Reform
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China’s Hukou System Is Stubbornly Resistant to Reform<br>ByEli Friedman<br>The Chinese authorities have announced a reform of the hukou system that ties citizens to a particular region and fosters inequality. But proclamations of the system’s death are premature, as powerful social groups have an interest in maintaining it.
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Is China abolishing the hukou? Since the State Council of the People’s Republic of China announced a new guideline on public services on May 18, this question has led to an outpouring of commentary. For decades, analysts from a wide range of political orientations have called for ending the hukou. Has the moment arrived?<br>Most economists have argued that hukou introduces labor market imperfections and suppresses domestic consumption. Socialists and other progressives, on the other hand, have criticized the tiered citizenship regime and widely differentiated access to social services enshrined by the hukou’s mobility controls, seeing these restrictions as certain to reproduce stark inequalities across generations.<br>The past few weeks have seen a rising chorus of optimism that this relic of the command economy is finally falling.
The question of hukou’s demise, however, is as old as China’s capitalist reforms. In 1994, when mass rural–urban migration was only just beginning, the South China Morning Post ran the headline “Registration System Set to Be Abolished.” It wasn’t, but six years later the State Development Planning Commission announced that China “aims to abolish the system over the next five years.”<br>For decades, analysts from a wide range of political orientations have called for ending the hukou.Four years after that, the New York Times credulously reported, “China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces.” In response to this anthology of dashed hopes, misinterpretations, and some bad-faith propaganda, Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham penned a landmark article in the China Quarterly in 2008 in which they answered definitively: no, the hukou may be changing, but it is not going away.<br>In the nearly two decades since Chan and Buckingham’s article, the debate has not gone away. Notably, the central government announced a “new urbanization” plan in 2013 which called for hukou to be “based on a person’s place of residence and job” by 2020.<br>As part of the effort to drum up support for the new plan, state media reported that Xi Jinping himself had argued in his 2001 dissertation that “the historical trend points to the abolition of the hukou system” and that access to social services should be leveled out. Three decades after that SCMP headline proclaimed the demise of hukou, the Global Times, less confident than their late twentieth-century counterparts, wondered, “Is China’s Household Registration Disappearing?”<br>The above is merely a précis of the Groundhog Day–like reiteration of this hopeful, perhaps dewy-eyed question over the decades. Why then, despite seeming consensus from the central state and its critics alike, did hukou persist? While it certainly has not been abolished, what has changed? What, if anything, makes this current moment different? And what might an actually liberatory hukou abolition look like?
The hukou is, above all, a tool for realizing enhanced exploitation of the rural population through mobility control. Based on the Soviet propiska internal passport system, the modern instantiation of hukou was implemented in 1958. This new system linked the provision of social goods to a specific place.<br>Leaving one’s place of official hukou registration meant forsaking access to state-provided goods, including health care, education, pensions, and, at the time, food. The population was divided up into urban and rural populations, with the former enjoying greater access to services while the latter enjoyed collective property rights in the countryside.<br>Leaving one’s place of official hukou registration meant forsaking access to state-provided goods.Equally important, and often overlooked, is that people were pinned to a specific city or village; a person could not move from a small provincial city in Shanxi to Beijing just as they pleased, for example. The hierarchy among cities is often as important as that between rural and urban...