Hukou Status and Sentencing in the Wake of Internal Migration: The Penalty Effect of Being Rural‐to‐Urban Migrants in China

• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12101
• Author: Kai Kuang,Jize Jiang

Hukou Status and Sentencing in the Wake

of Internal Migration: The Penalty Effect of Being

Rural-to-Urban Migrants in China

JIZE JIANG and KAI KUANG

While the disparate legal treatment of immigrants in Western jurisdictions has been well

documented in sociolegal scholarship, the potential legal inequality experienced by rural-to-

urban migrants in China, who have become China’s largest disadvantaged social group, has not

garnered much attention. To fill the gap, this article empirically examines sentencing disparities

related to the Hukou status of criminal offenders by employing quantitative data on criminal

case processing in China. The results of our analysis reveal that rural-to-urban migrant

defendants are more likely to be sentenced to prison than their urban counterparts. In addition,

the penalty effect of being a rural-to-urban migrant is further magnified in jurisdictions with a

larger concentration of migrants. Our findings suggest that discrimination against rural-to-

urban migrants has become an emerging, significant form of legal inequality in China’s criminal

justice system, refracting and reinforcing the deep-seated structural inequality associated with

Hukou status in China. The research and policy implications of these findings are discussed.

I. INTRODUCTION

Chinese society has undergone profound transformations following the governmental

adoption of economic reforms and policies promoting urbanization in the late 1970s.

Among these transformations, one of the most significant is the emergence and accelera-

tion of internal migration, wherein a large number of rural residents move to cities or

coastal areas (Liang and Ma 2004; Naughton 1996). According to the 2010 Chinese cen-

sus, China’s floating population, or number of temporary rural-to-urban migrants,

reached 221 million, which is 16.5 percent of the total population of China. Among them,

a “tidal wave” of rural migrant laborers has moved to cities in search of better economic

opportunities and constitutes the majority of the migrant population (Roberts 1997). The

number of rural-to-urban migrant laborers has reached 163.36 million, accounting for

12.6 percent of China’s total population, an increase from roughly 30 million in 1989

(National Bureau of Statistics of China 2010).

This research was supported in part by funding from the National Social Science Foundation of China (中国

国家社会科学基金青年项目) (Award No. 17CFX064). We record our thanks to three anonymous

reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments, which have considerably improved the article. Our grati-

tude goes to Michael Walsh and N. A. Weihe for their editorial work on a previous draft of the article. We are

also grateful to attendees of a presentation of this article at the 2016 annual meeting of the American Society of

Criminology in Washington, DC, for their constructive feedback and for inspiring us to contemplate how Chi-

na’s contemporary massive internal migration affects crime and punishment in China.

Address correspondence to: Jize Jiang, University of Illinois at Chicago—Criminology, Law, and Justice,

1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607, USA: Telephone: 312-504-6082;E-mail: jjiang25@uic.edu.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 40, No. 2, April 2018 ISSN 0265-8240

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doi: 10.1111/lapo.12101

This massive wave of internal migration and its impacts on rural-to-urban migrants

and Chinese society have garnered considerable scholarly attention, with particular focus

being placed on the influence of the Hukou system on migrants’ behavioral and social

outcomes. In China, each person possesses a Hukou status informing where the resident

is registered and in what jurisdiction the status is administered. As a residence status

granted by a local government agency (bureau of public security), Hukou status is an

important marker of outsiders versus insiders, or migrants versus locals, in the jurisdic-

tion. More importantly, Hukou status is also demarcated by a rural versus an urban

Hukou registration, which has implications for inequalities between rural peasants and

urban residents. Officially denied residency in cities, the more than eighty million mem-

bers of the rural-to-urban migrant population provide labor for the economic boom in

urban areas but are largely denied governmental benefits that urban residents receive

(Solinger 1999; Cheng and Selden 1994).

A bourgeoning body of literature has investigated how the Hukou status of rural-to-

urban migrants may influence their adaptation processes and integration outcomes in

their new locations (Chan 2010). It has been documented that social and economic disad-

vantages due to rural Hukou status manifest in numerous domains of social life, including

education, access to local medical services, health care and social security, the ability to

purchase a home, the availability of housing and safe communities, and the potential for

upward social mobility (Hesketh et al. 2008; Wong et al. 2007; Wu and Treiman 2007;

Guo and Iredale 2004). The scholarship on China’s Hukou system has suggested that

Hukou status, rooted in historical population policy, has become a structural form of

stratification and inequality in contemporary China. Due to the institutional arrangement

enabled by Hukou, rural-to-urban migrants are on the path toward becoming “a new

underclass in China” (Solinger 2006).

Despite multidimensional disadvantages experienced by rural-to-urban migrants in cit-

ies, surprisingly few studies have directly examined the impact of Hukou status on the

legal lives of migrants, especially in the realms of state social control and criminal justice.

1

Even less research concerns the relationship between rural migrant defendants and the

criminal sanctions they receive. While much legal scholarship has normatively or jurispru-

dentially explored the potential disadvantageous position of migrant criminal defendants

in Chinese criminal law, to our knowledge its empirical verification has not yet been con-

ducted. An empirical investigation into the issue is warranted for several reasons.

First, a sizable body of literature in Western jurisdictions has documented the punish-

ment consequences for transnational immigrants—that is, immigrant criminal defendants

are likely to receive harsher penalties than their native counterparts, even though they

have less criminality (Light, Massoglia, and King 2014; Aas and Bosworth 2013). Immi-

gration tends to be criminalized, and undocumented immigrants are subject to the expan-

sive deployment of detention and deportation (Jiang and Erez 2018; Kubrin, Zatz, and

Martinez 2012). Despite the observed general trend in Western countries (especially in the

United States and West European countries), the question remains: is the “punitive turn”

directed at immigrants particular to the West, or is the penalty consequence inherently a

part of the migration process? Exploring this question in the context of China, a country

experiencing unprecedented internal migration, may open up a wider window through

which to better understand migration and punishment.

Second, our study holds important policy implications. A new round of judicial reform

is being undertaken in China that particularly promotes procedural justice and develops

an adjudication-centered justice model as a means of building a fairer criminal justice sys-

tem. Reform measures emphasize the role of judges and their sentencing on constructing

a fair and just legal system. Our research may inform these reform efforts by drawing

Jiang and Kuang CHINA’S HUKOU AND SENTENCING 197

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