Portrait of an LBX

It’s about time for a follow up on the post about my friend Ms. Li and her hukou application, which has been submitted for over 4 months to date. Now as winter is beginning its southward creep over China, it seems that Ms. Li and her husband’s dream of becoming full citizens in the city of their choice is withering like the leaves. Though the government has given them no official response (as it is wont to do), traditionally being stone-walled for this long means that their application has fallen into a black hole of bureaucracy, not to be seen or heard from again unless they feel like redoing the whole process again next year – if, of course, her husband’s SOE is still willing to exert the effort to sponsor an application. So next year they’ll be heading to the housing registration bureau to renew their housing permits just like every other Zhang, Wang, and Li from somewhere else. But hey, it could be worse – they could have been born minorities.

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…)

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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