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]

The result of the hukou system has been the de facto creation of a two-class citizenry.  The urban population, estimated at between 14 and 26% of the total by various accounts, has been designated as the “target population” and has virtually exclusive access to “economic and social opportunities, activities, and benefits, and … [participation in] Chinese politics.” Thus in China, one’s personal rights and social status – in addition to those of one’s children – are determined solely on the basis of where and more importantly to whom one is born.[5] This simple fact sheds the first glimmers of light on one principle motivation of the widespread flight toward urban centers: the hope of eventual acceptance and integration into the first class society.  Unfortunately those hopes often boil down to not much more than pipe dreams for the vast majority of LBXes engaged in “Blight Flight” (running away from dismal situations back at home to chase a higher income urban dream).

For the purposes of this article, I’ll describe only the various tiers of privilege that exist in the Shanghai Registration system.  This article is meant to be both exemplary of the system at large and to set the stage for a specific case study that will be coming to this website soon.  For the sake of organization and legibility, I’ve broken down the various levels of citizenship from “best” to “worst” (could also be interpreted as “most rights and privileges” to “least rights and privileges”).

1. Holder of a Shanghai Hukou: Once you’ve got one, you’ve got it for life (at least that’s the way it’s worked since the PRC was established). You can come and go as you please, and your kids can go to Shanghai schools (arguably the best public schools in China) without your having to pay a one-time fee. You’re given a social insurance card that’s good in Shanghai. You can use it in most hospitals in the area and get what is called partial payment by the government – what amounts to a subsidized discount for locals. It’s considerably easier to get permits to go to Hong Kong or visas to a lot of foreign countries if you’re a citizen of Shanghai, Beijing, or Shenzhen. It’s also theoretically impossible for the police to run local hukou holders out of Shanghai the way they ran migrant workers out of Beijing for the Olympics.  Institutionally speaking, those who have Shanghai registration belong in Shanghai.

2. Holder of a Shanghai Residence Permit: At present they need to be renewed annually. In order to get a residence permit, you need at least an undergraduate degree plus proof of employment. You can send your kids to Shanghai public schools without paying the one time fee but are required to pay annual tuition. That said, everyone pays annual tuition. You are given a social insurance card in Shanghai as well, which means that you have to pay your social security payments in Shanghai. However, let’s say you move to Shanghai to work after graduating and pay into the social security system until you retire. If you wanted to retire to somewhere outside the madness of the city, oops, you aren’t going to get social insurance anywhere! Did I mention that social insurance is good only where you live? And it’s not just about retirement – your social benefits simply don’t travel with you. Period. Supposedly you can turn in medical expenses incurred elsewhere for reimbursement, but that doesn’t fly if you don’t have your residence permit anymore.

3. Holder of Temporary Registration: Also good for one year and must be renewed annually. You’re allowed to live and work in Shanghai, but there’s no social insurance for you. You have to pay your social benefits just the same, but you can tell the government to send them back to where you live. What, your backwoods local government doesn’t reimburse for hospital expenses in Shanghai? Sorry, bud, should have thought of that before. Thanks for paying into our system, and have a nice day. If you want to send your kid to school in Shanghai, you have to pay a one-time fee of between 50,000 and 100,000 RMB ($7,299 to $14,598 – a truly colossal sum for most people who fall into this category) in addition to annual tuition of 7,000 to 10,000 RMB (~$1,000 to ~$1,500). You can send your kids to a private school instead, as many migrant workers do, but they get no funding at all except for what little tuition poor migrants can pay, and these schools are pretty dismal. The prestige of public vs. private schools is effectively the opposite of what it is in America. This is why most migrants send their kids to school back where they’re from while they live for years in big cities. Nevertheless, you are legal as long as you are temporarily registered.

4. Illegal: You slipped in and are making some covert yuan doing God-knows-what. Even construction workers can get temporary registration if they bother. A good example of this category is a hobo I saw being arrested today. When I asked a Chinese friend if they were going to throw him in jail, I was told, “He wishes he could get free food and housing from the government that easily. They’re going to figure out where he’s from, send his ass back there, and make a note that they’ve already done this once. If it happens a few times, they might consider other actions.”

Why is it so important that people remain legally tied to an area?  Let’s think of a few hypothetical American scenarios to contrast here.  Let’s say you’re recently unemployed Bob from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the public schools closely resemble nightmares, yet you’re not inclined to pay to send your kids to a private school for economic or other reasons and you can’t find work anywhere.  What options do you have, other than picketing city hall?  Clearly you have to move and start a new life.  So let’s say you move to Texas, where there are jobs for you, and the schools are much better.  The second you arrive in Texas and change your residency, you are a Texas citizen, no questions asked, and your kids can enroll in the public schools there.   Now that Bob has been in Texas for a few years, his job evaporates.  Lucky for him, there just so happen to be openings in North Carolina, where Bob’s family is headed next.

Now let’s say you’re Mr. Wang from rural Gansu province in an area where the water is known to be polluted, there are no jobs, and your kid – God help you if they make you pay the fine for extra kid(s) – attends school in a shack.  So you pack up your family, hop on a train, and head for Shanghai, where you get a job doing menial labor, your kids go to school, and your family is able to meld into the local life, right?  Not quite.  More likely, you’ll entrust your pride and joy to your parents or other close family relatives and hop on the train by yourself or maybe with your wife (if there’s no farm work or other matters to be attended to at home).  You’ll arrive in Shanghai, quickly get employed, probably in construction or manufacturing, and start banking 1500 RMB (~$200) a month.  You’ll likely work 12 hour days 7 days a week and send the majority of your income to your family, whom you’ll likely see once a year at Chinese New Year for a week.  If there’s a problem, or you’re unemployed and thus unregistered at any point, there’s a chance that the police will round you up and throw you the hell out of Shanghai – especially likely if you’re considered to be de-beautifying the city before the World Expo in 2010.

Hopefully this brief introduction to the hukou system has given you some basic knowledge of one of the fundamental political factors affecting LBXes. Stay tuned for more articles in this vein and hopefully more in depth reporting on the symptoms of the system.  As with everything we publish here, our aim is to describe the condition of the common Chinese and not get into the nitty gritty of policy and politics.  For more perspectives, please see the following:

A Chinese blogger’s views on the hukou:

An economic perspective from the US embassy:

And for good measure, an official stance on the hukou from a state-run newspaper.

[2] Kipnis, 116.

[3] Kam Wing Chan and Li Zhang, “The Hukou System and Rural-urban Migration: Processes and Changes,” in The China Quarterly, Volume 160, Issue 1, (1999), 825-827.

[4] Chan and Zhang, 832-833.

[5] Fei-Ling Wang, Organizing Through Division and Exclusion, (Palo Alto: Stanford U. Press, 2005), 24.