Strangers in the city: the hukou and urban citizenship in China.

• Author: Mackenzie, Peter W.

"Even as migrants' hukou status excludes them from many of the entitlements provided by the state, they also enjoy greater autonomy from state control than any other group within Chinese society."

On National Day (1 October) 2001, China's government announced that it would ease the restrictions of the hukou, or household registration system, and that it planned to abolish the system within five years. The hukou, which binds Chinese people to their places of birth, may be reasonably described as the broadest experiment in population control in human history. Its abolition would indelibly affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants whose exclusion from China's economic boom has led them to seek better opportunities in the cities.

The hukou, introduced during the first decade of the People's Republic of China, institutionalizes the denial of basic rights and services to China's so-called floating population of 150 million rural-to-urban migrant laborers. Under the hukou system, rural migrants in the cities are forbidden to own land, barred from the most promising jobs and unable to access the subsidized education and medical care to which urban residents are entitled. Although the abundant and cheap labor provided by migrants has fueled the dizzyingly rapid growth of China's urban economy, these migrants remain adrift between the poverty of rural existence and the unattainable privileges of urban citizenship. They are a class of strangers in the city, largely in visible to city planners and often disdained by permanent residents. To integrate these outsiders into China's urban citizenry without unleashing new threats to stability is one of the greatest challenges a new generation of Chinese leaders will face.

YEARS OF CONTROL

Before the implementation in 1953 of China's first five-year economic plan, Chinese citizens were allowed to travel and change their residence freely, provided they registered the move with the Public Security Bureau. (1) This registration system was used chiefly to monitor changes in population distribution, and the state made little attempt to stem the movement of labor from the countryside to the city. With the development in the early 1950s of labor-intensive heavy industries, 30 million rural laborers poured into the cities to find employment, causing China's urban population to leap from 10.64 percent of the total in 1949 to 18.41 in 1959. (2)

In the mid-1950s, China's leaders, seeking to harness this population flow and direct it toward key industrial targets, began to explore more ambitious prerogatives for the registration system. Social scientist Dorothy Solinger traces this development to the Marxist ideal among China's revolutionary generation of "lock[ing] onto the land a potential underclass, ready to be exploited to fulfill the new state's cherished project of industrialization." Rural people would form an "industrial reserve army" that could be called up whenever needed for construction or industrial initiatives. (3)

In 1955, a State Council directive formulated a preliminary household registration system, including ornate procedures by which citizens would be required to apply for permission to migrate. (4) However, enforcement mechanisms did not exist until 1958, when a law passed by the National People's Congress forbade anyone without a valid urban registration to buy food or grain in the city. (5) This law effectively would have cut off rural-to-urban migration had it not been passed in the same year that Chairman Mao Tse-tung inaugurated the Great Leap Forward, a massive push toward industrialization whose failure resulted in the deaths by starvation of 30 million Chinese. (6)

In 1959 and 1960, to fuel the Great Leap's massive expansion of urban industry, residence restrictions were suspended and state firms recruited 19 million rural workers. (7) When the Great Leap failed, millions more fled to the cities to escape starvation. However, the cities were themselves battling food shortages, and the government soon became aware that it would not be able to feed such a large urban population. The urban proletariat on which China based its socialist economy would have to be protected while the peasants would have to fend for themselves. Between 1961 and 1963, 50 million rural migrants were deported from the cities to the countryside, and the hukou went into full effect. (8)

The hukou comes in two varieties: agricultural and nonagricultural, distributed respectively to rural and urban citizens. In the Mao years, a non-agricultural hukou was issued to each urban household, but in the countryside only one registration booklet was issued to each cooperative, binding peasants not just to their families but to entire rural social units. (9) Citizens in Mao's China were not allowed to change an agricultural hukou into a non-agricultural one, except when given new official work assignments or ordered to move. Migration within China during the 1960s and 1970s occurred primarily in response to recruitment by urban labor departments for state-initiated projects. (10) In this period, the household registration policy was rigidly enforced, and those who attempted to migrate without authorization were harassed by police, met with blockades and forcibly deported. (11)

In 1977, a State Council document added further restrictions, barring even rural inhabitants who married city-dwellers from moving to cities and stipulating that the hukou be allocated to children according to their mothers' status, thus forbidding a child with an agricultural hukou from living with a city-registered father. (12)

The hukou system met with remarkable success in the first two decades of its existence, virtually ending all spontaneous movement within the world's most populous country. This success should not be attributed solely to the legal power of the hukou itself but rather to the strict system of rationing that complemented it. In Mao-era cities, basic staples such as grain, cotton, cooking oil, milk, sugar and meat could only be bought in state-run markets using rationing certificates, which were unattainable to those without a non-agricultural hukou. (13) Furthermore, nearly all urban employment was assigned by the state labor bureau, which was authorized to allocate jobs only to official city residents. (14) Urban residents' danwei, or work units, provided all city housing. As a result, the only existence available to a rural migrant in a Chinese city was that of a homeless, unemployed beggar, a prospect that kept most peasants in their place despite their often-miserable existence in the countryside.

However, it was also the state's reliance on the denial of necessities to enforce the hukou that crippled the system's effectiveness when economic reforms were introduced. These reforms also created intense...