Portrait of an LBX

The last post introduced you to the hukou system.  Now it’s time to get to a case in point.  It begins with a friend of mine who hails from Anhui province (think West Virginia), a place known for its beauty but also widely considered irreconcilably backward and poor. How poor is it?  When I meet an LBX doing menial labor in Shanghai, I usually just ask where in Anhui he or she comes and wait for the exasperated “how did you know?”

Nevertheless, there does exist a white-collar contingency in Anhui, of which my friend, who we’ll call Ms. Li just in case, is one. Since leaving Anhui, Ms. Li’s life has been punctuated by abrupt changes and adaptations, but being resilient, she’s managed to keep her head above water. Recently, her immediate future was solidified by a rushed marriage to a very well educated ex-diplomatic service officer, who, having become fed up with working in the foreign service, moved to Shanghai and to work for a gargantuan state-owned enterprise (SOE).

Why is her marriage to this man of letters relevant, you ask? It is important because his employment has put him in a decent position to apply for a Shanghai hukou (pronounced hoo koh), or what could be called, for all intents and purposes, “Shanghai citizenship.”

Hold the phone. Aren’t they already Chinese citizens? (more…)

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This weekend as I watched an episode of Planet Earth, I noticed that David Attenborough began each segment by describing a new environment and the specific advantages or disadvantages it poses to life, after which he introduced the wildlife found there in terms relating to this environment. It occurred to me as an effective sequence for introducing the layman to strange creatures as they relate to their own extraordinary habitats which the audience might otherwise have trouble comprehending at first glance. Analogously, this post will hopefully help describe part of the unfamiliar LBX environment in order to orient our readers, who otherwise might have difficulty taking in the larger picture all at once.

Today it’s not sulphur rich ocean water surrounding underwater volcanoes, but rather the hukou registration system in which all mainland Chinese exist – LBXes included.  The hukou (户口), or household registration system, is essentially the manner in which the Chinese government divides up its citizens.  The majority of the population possesses a peasant (农民) registration, and the remainder possesses a non-peasant (非农), or, by extension, urban registration.  Since the rural reforms of 1978, peasant families are all allocated a plot of land on which to farm, and from that land to pay grain taxes.  Non-peasants are all divided into work units (单位) – the ostensible determination for what their occupation will be – are given no land, and are legal residents of cities or towns.[1] The distinctions are passed patrilineally to children, but there are a few methods by which a Chinese citizen born as a peasant can obtain a non-peasant hukou.[2]

These will be discussed in a later article.

The process by which a Chinese citizen with a peasant hukou becomes an urban resident, or Nongzhuanfei (农转非), can be compared to the immigration system in the US, with the exception that in the Chinese situation, the “immigrants” are already citizens, but institutionally regarded as second class once they breach the city limits.  In most cases those who qualify for Nongzhuanfei are of use to the state: students graduating from institutions of higher education, technicians recruited for industry, or local administrators chosen for promotion to senior administrative positions.[3] Since 1985, however, peasants have been allowed to legally reside in places other than where they are officially registered by obtaining a temporary residency permit.  This has resulted in the a colossal outflow of peasants from their places of birth into urban centers.[4]

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An old muslim man leans against the steps of Id Kah mosque in Kashgar, Xinjiang. During prayer time, beggars will sit at the entrances to the mosque to receive alms, but I don't believe this man was one of them.

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While traveling through Xinjiang, my girlfriend Devi and I signed up for a four-day tour to Kanas Lake Nature Reserve with a Chinese tour group. This is something I normally would avoid at all costs because Chinese tours usually involve a tour guide who speaks incessantly over the bus PA system, which doubles as a karaoke system, and thus comes equipped with excessive reverb. This tour was no exception (the tour guide even directed a reverb-filled talent show on the bus), but the price was right, and we were equipped with iPods.

The tour group consisted almost entirely of Han Chinese living in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. For many years, China has been sending Han Chinese into its sensitive border territories like Tibet and Xinjiang, purportedly for development purposes and to maintain racial “harmony.” In the past, this “sinicization” came in the form of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a semi-military organization of settlers that has built farms, towns, and cities over scattered parts of Xinjiang. Today, it is continued largely through economic incentives. The result is underlying tension between the Han Chinese and the local Uyghur, Kazakh and Mongols — all officially Chinese minorities. While Xinjiang as a whole is still majority-Uyghur, many places are majority-Han Chinese, such as Urumqi, which was over 75% Han as of the 2000 census.

Without getting too political, that is some necessary background to this story.

On one night of our trip to Kanas Lake, which sits in Xinjiang’s far northwest corner and borders Russia and Kazakhstan, our accommodations were arranged dorm-style, and I shared a room with two Han men from Urumqi. The younger of the two quickly fell asleep, but I struck up a long conversation with the second, Mr. Wu, who was traveling with his wife in his fiftieth year in Xinjiang. It was his first time up north.

Mr. Wu: Sent unwillingly to Xinjiang fifty years ago

My first question was why he had chosen to move to Xinjiang, in response to which he at first offered only a puzzled look. A Jiangsu native, Wu graduated from university in 1959. “That was Mao Zedong’s time,” Wu told me. “Back then you didn’t choose where you lived or who you worked for. I was assigned to a danwei (work unit) in Xinjiang.”

And if you chose to turn down your assignment?

“You would be dealt with (处理),” was the response he gave, choosing not to elaborate. (more…)

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