10

Adapting the Hukou to Modernise the Country While Maintaining Social Polarisation and Stratification

Chloé Froissart

Originating from the ancestral baojia¹ system (Dutton 1992; Wang 2005) and introduced during the Qing dynasty to register the population for the purposes of census, conscription, tax collection and maintaining social order, the hukou is the oldest extant institution in the history of China. Throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the adaption and reform of this imperial institution has played a central role in the project for the modernisation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Party has used the hukou system to control and then plan the urbanisation of the country, and hence negotiate the difficult transition from a rural to an urban society while at the same time reducing the financial costs of this transition for the state. The hukou has also constantly been leveraged to support economic development, whatever strategy was employed by the CCP at different times, at great human cost.

Generating considerable inequality and injustice, the hukou has been the object of so much criticism, both in China and abroad, that Xi Jinping, focusing on ‘common prosperity’ (gongtong fuyu 共同富裕), promised to accelerate reforms as early as 2013.² The notion of common prosperity, mentioned by Mao Zedong in a 1955 speech calling for the acceleration of collectivisation in order to improve the standard of living of poor peasants, was originally closely linked to the founder’s ideals of equality (Mao 1955). When Deng Xiaoping took up the phrase in 1985, he was postponing it for a distant future, affirming that some should get rich first.³ Xi Jinping, wishing to make common prosperity a reality during his reign to legitimise his authority, then associated it with justice and equity.⁴

While the CCP, following the line set out by Sun Yat-sen, has always emphasised the people’s wellbeing, this chapter argues that the hukou has been the instrument of a socially polarising modernisation based on the exploitation and the exclusion of part of the population who possessed only their labour force, while mainstreaming a socioeconomic elite. The purpose of this institution during the Maoist regime, and the manner in which it has been reformed according to pragmatic criteria, serves as a reminder that the individual has always been considered a tool of the party-state, implying the sacrifice of part of the population for the benefit of the present prosperity of some and the supposed prosperity of all in the future.

This chapter traces this sacrifice’s history, considering the manner in which features of the hukou have been perpetuated and adapted. By analysing the policies put in place to manage the integration of rural migrants in urban areas, it also outlines the main lines of the current social model and stresses how it recycles the principles of social citizenship as they were defined by the hukou in the Mao era. The long view favoured in the analysis of this institution allows us to explore the historical trajectory of the China development model upon which the definition of Xi Jinping’s intended common prosperity model now depends.

This chapter highlights the recycling of Maoist principles of social citizenship in Xi’s model of ‘common prosperity’ as embodied by the integration of migrant workers in urban eras through their access to public services. To do so, it offers a three-step overview of the role played by the hukou system in the modernisation of China and its social consequences since the founding of the PRC. In the Mao era, the hukou was an instrument for organising labour and for controlling migration that enabled the exploitation of peasants to be used to benefit the development of heavy industry, and it established a localised, functional and stratified social citizenship.⁵ The reforms redefined the features of the hukou to create an instrument for exploitation of migrants from the countryside for the benefit of the urban economy, particularly light industry, and for a system of urban planning favouring the integration of socioeconomic elites. Lastly, the point-record system, an avatar of the hukou regulating migrants’ access to public services in the country’s largest cities, has created an elitist and differentiated model for integration. Although it is more inclusive than during the Mao era or early reform era, the present social model – which started to be implemented in the second half of the 2000s – remains based on the principles of local, functional and stratified social citizenship. It still favours the integration of socioeconomic elites associated with urban development and continues to exclude the proletariat.

The Functions of the Hukou in the Socialist Development Project and Its Consequences on the Principles of Social Citizenship in the Mao Era

Originating under the imperial regime and modelled on the system of the Soviet propiska⁶ (Dutton 1992; Wang 2005), the hukou system was an essential instrument for the organisation of labour and production, as well as for the collection and redistribution of resources all through the Mao era. Aiming to limit the labour market’s instability and population growth in the urban areas where the inhabitants were supported by the state, it served as an auxiliary to industrialisation without urbanisation. It divided Chinese citizens into two distinct categories by attributing different rights and duties. But beyond the evident division between the rural and the urban population, the hukou system established a local, functionalist and stratified conception of social citizenship that has survived until the present in spite of numerous reforms.

A Tool for Organising the Labour and the Exploitation of Peasant Farmers

The formalisation of the hukou was one of the elements establishing the fundamental features of the PRC; that is, a Soviet-type regime based on economic planning. Formally established on 9 January 1958 in the PRC Household Registration Regulations, the hukou system was a specific element of socialist development in the Chinese context, encouraging rapid industrialisation, while prioritising the heavy industry sector, in the context of an agricultural labour surplus. Unlike the USSR, China had a very low level of urbanisation and a huge workforce, 85 per cent of which were peasants (Cheng 1991, 252). As during the revolution, Maoist dialectics transformed a Chinese weakness into an advantage, using the countryside to establish an unequal exchange between the agricultural and industrial sectors. In December 1953, the central government designed a system of mandatory sale to the state of grain quotas at very low prices. By heavily taxing the countryside in this way, the state managed to create a ‘surplus’ with which to finance industry and urban infrastructure, as well as providing ‘iron rice bowls’ to the urban population (Cheng and Selden 1994; Wang 2005).

The hukou system was intended to institutionalise this unequal exchange between the countryside and the cities by assigning to each citizen a position in the system of production – a position on which rights and duties depended. From 1958 onwards, this system covered the entire population of China and organised the workers into people’s communes and works units, categorising them according to this registration as agricultural (nongye 农业) or non-agricultural (fei nongye 非农业). This categorisation established a hierarchy between the elite of the regime (mostly urban workers and employees in the state sector, cadres and army) and peasants. While the latter had to count on their own resources for food, housing, health care and education, the state took charge of the urban population from cradle to grave. The state allocated lifetime employment to urbanites and provided them with ration cards for food and clothing. The state also provided housing, education and social services, as well as public services such as water supply, sewage, transport and policing (Cheng 1991; Cheng and Selden 1994; Chan 1994; Wang 2005).

Designed as a ‘mechanism of mass exploitation on a national scale’, the hukou system created a state of internal colonisation in a context in which it was impossible for the CCP, because of its denunciation of capitalism and its links to imperialist expansion, to import from abroad the human resources and the raw materials necessary for its development as Western powers had done (Hayward 2022). Between 1949 and 1979, at least 600 billion yuan were transferred from rural communes to the urban state sector. While, in the early 1950s, the income of the urban population was twice that of the rural, in the late 1970s it had become four to six times greater thanks to state subsidies (Cheng 1991, 209–10, 247). However, at the time, this exploitation was not recognised as such. It wore the appearance of the egalitarianism dear to Mao, being disguised by the fact that the peasants were, in theory at least, the owners of their means of production within the people’s communes.

An Instrument to Control Urbanisation: The End of Freedom of Movement

Although the PRC originally recognised freedom of movement and choice of place of residence (see the Common Program of 1949 and the PRC Constitution of 1954), the CCP was soon obliged to use travel authorisations and check points to strictly control migration. Such control was indeed necessary to limit public spending in urban areas and keep each individual in their assigned place in the production system in a context in which urban benefits were a strong pull factor for peasants. From the early 1960s, only two types of migration were allowed: temporary and permanent, both organised by the state via strict procedures. Temporary migration allowed for collective labour contracts between an agricultural production brigade and an urban enterprise, at the end of which the peasants were sent back to their villages. Living conditions for migrant workers in the city were different from those of urban workers in that they were considered temporary workers retaining their rural status (Walder 1986). Permanent migration was accompanied by a transfer of hukou from another location and implied a change of status when the move was from a rural to an urban location or vice versa. It was extremely rare to be granted non-agricultural status, which could occur only through strict administrative procedures (being recruited permanently by a state enterprise or the army, being promoted to an administrative post, attending university) and according to annual quotas set by the State Planning Commission. In all cases, any change in status had to be aligned with state objectives and did not take personal reasons into account, such as family regrouping (Chan and Zhang 1999; Chan and Buckingham 2008). According to a survey carried out in a village in Guangdong from 1964 to 1978, the annual probability for obtaining a non-agricultural status was 0.0228 per cent for a man and 0.0028 per cent for a woman (Potter 1983, 495).

Establishing a Complex Hierarchy between Chinese Citizens: A Local, Functionalist and Stratified Social ‘Citizenship’

The hukou system reflected a functionalist conception of ‘citizenship’: the rights and duties of individuals were a function of their role in building socialism. This hereditary system (as the hukou was inherited from the mother until 1998)⁷ gave rise to a status structure distinguishing a minority of privileged citizens (15 per cent of the population) from the vast majority of the peasants who had hardly any rights. But the consequence of the Maoist hukou was the establishing of a status system based on a complex categorisation of individuals extending far beyond the simple differentiation between the rural and the urban population. It introduced a status hierarchy across three criteria. First, the hukou introduced a functionalist classification of individuals as agricultural or non-agricultural. Second, within the latter category, it created differentiated treatment for urban dwellers based on the politico-spatial hierarchy of the cities where they lived. That the place of registration is mentioned in the hukou booklet underlines the importance of the local level in the Chinese system. Individuals belong to a given community, whether it is rural or urban, and their rights vary according to the economic and social resources of these communities. The Maoist regime established a strict spatial hierarchy favouring large urban centres. The village figured at the base of the ladder, then the township, the county, the city, the provincial capital, the autonomous municipality (Tianjin, Shanghai) and, right at the top, the national capital, Beijing. The higher up they lived on the ladder, the greater the state subsidies; the lower down, the higher the taxes they paid (Trolliet and Béja 1986, 154). Third, the hukou system determined status according to the hierarchy of the people’s communes and the production units, among which a huge variation in living and working conditions prevailed, and to which individuals were bound by a relationship of ‘organised dependence’ (Walder 1986). From 1958 onwards, the work unit rather than the family defined the existence of a hukou, so that if husband and wife worked in two different production units (danwei 单位) or two different people’s communes, or in an urban danwei and a people’s commune (a frequent occurrence as the state assigned jobs), they each had a different hukou (Cheng and Selden 1994, 663).

In this way, the hukou fragmented the social body into a complex status system in order to facilitate administration and control, for production and allocation of resources, as well as for social control (Wang 2005). In complete contradiction to the notion of citizen equality stipulated in the 1954 and 1982 constitutions⁸ and the egalitarianism intended by Mao, inequality was institutionalised in the bedrock of Chinese society by the hukou system. It imposed a particularising logic that endlessly subdivided society and, in practice, erased any aspect of equality between individuals. Thus it was the basis of a local, stratified and functionalist conception of social citizenship, whereas the concept of citizenship included in the PRC Constitution refers to a national citizenship and proceeds according to a universalist logic, insisting on what unites individuals rather than what differentiates them.

The Hukou under Reform: An Instrument for the Exploitation of Migrants and Urban Planning

The discontinuation of the socialist development project and the reintroduction of the market economy ran parallel with the redefinition of the functions of the hukou. From a system of exploitation of peasants for the development of heavy industry, the hukou was morphed into a system for the exploitation of migrants to the benefit of the urban economy, particularly the development of light industry geared to export. At the same time, from being a system for the control of urban development, the hukou became an urban planning tool that allowed the CCP to negotiate the difficult transition from a rural to an urban society, at the lowest cost to the state.

Retaining the Hukou, or the Creation of the Largest Proletariat in World History

The hukou constituted an efficient instrument for controlling migration as long as it remained a coherent part of a series of social and economic control mechanisms. However, these devices were challenged by the reintroduction of the market economy and by the partial withdrawal of the Party from the economic and social spheres from 1980 onwards. The disbanding of the people’s communes freed the peasants from their shackles and provided a large supernumerary workforce that found employment first in small town businesses, then in the cantons and special economic zones, and then in the cities during the late 1980s when economic reforms were introduced there too. The year 1985 was a turning point: the creation of an identity card (a personal document, whereas the hukou booklet was collective) and temporary residence permit made movement easier, while renting out accommodation to the migrant population ceased to be illegal (Zhang, Chunhua and Ping 1998, 90). At the same time, the end of rationing in 1992 after the emergence of a grain market, and the monetisation of the economy, made it easier for migrants to stay in cities (Wang 1997, 159). The gradual removal of the obstacles to population movement and the development of the urban economy led to a steep rise in migration towards the cities. From 1991 to 2013, the urban workforce rose to 269 million, of whom 85 per cent were migrants from the countryside (Lin 2015, 38).

Table 10.1: Number of migrants from rural areas to urban areas (1980–2020)

Year	1980	1987	1989	1991	1999	2005	2010	2015	2020
Total number (by million)	2.5	28	30	42	209	230	242	277	286

Sources: China Statistical Yearbook; China Demographic Yearbook.

Keeping the hukou in place, and thus the agricultural status of the migrants moving from the countryside to the cities, as reflected in the neologism nongmingong (农民工, peasant workers), allowed the creation of a flexible reserve workforce that was cheap because deprived of rights. As social status was still attached to the place of hukou registration, city governments, as well as urban employers, were not responsible for the migrants’ social protection, whether it involved health care, retirement pension or their children’s education (Davin 1999; Pieke and Mallee 1999; Solinger 1999; Zhang 2001). Retaining the hukou also justified a segmentation of the employment market, keeping migrants in the most tiring and poorly paid jobs where their basic and essential rights (such as pay) were often not respected (Solinger 1999; Froissart 2013). In 2004, Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan revealed that 360 billion yuan were owed to migrant workers by their employers.⁹ In general, the number and cost of the many different permits needed to stay, work and live legally in the city kept migrants in a state of illegality and effectively in a situation of lawlessness (Froissart 2013, 106–26).

The term ‘peasant workers’ did not necessarily refer only to those employed in industry. Such workers also played a crucial part in the development of the urban economy in general during the reform period, finding employment in local services, building and commerce; some also ran small businesses (getihu 个体户). A significant number were employed in the export-oriented manufacturing sector, often working for subcontractors of multinational businesses and allowing China to become the ‘factory of the world’ (Chan 2003; Pun 2005). Globalisation of the economy launched by the Chinese state in the absence of social protection, collective rights, trade unions, justice and independent civil society created a specific model of proletarisation of these migrants (Chan, Pun and Chan 2010; Kuruvilla, Lee and Gallagher 2011). Thus, while during the Mao era the exploitation of the peasants allowed the CCP to develop the Chinese economy without resorting to imperialist expansion, during the reform period, the exploitation of migrants to the benefit of the urban economy and world capital constituted one of the major contributing factors of the Chinese economic miracle.

Table 10.2: Distribution of employment of rural migrants by sector

Sector	Manufacturing	Construction	Services
Distribution of jobs in 2005	27%	26%	32%
Proportion of migrant employees in the sector in 2000	68%	80%	52%

Sources: Ministry of Labour and Social Security, ‘A Series of Surveys: Number and Structural Characteristics of Current Floating Employment of Migrant Workers’ (劳动和社会保障部, 系列调查: 当前农民工流动就业数量、结构特点), 14 February 2006, news.sohu.com/20060214/n241813280.shtml; Bulletin on Main Data of the Fifth National Population Census in 2000 (2000年第五次全国人口普查主要数据公报), 28 March 2001, www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2001/content_60740.htm.

Although social citizenship remained connected to the place of hukou registration, above all, it was land that served as social welfare for migrant workers, who supposedly returned home when they were no longer needed in the cities. However, illegal expropriations carried out by local governments aware of the market value of land became more frequent during the 1990s, depriving migrants of the only security from which they could benefit and effectively changing them into proletarians. According to official statistics, between 1990 and 2005, the surface area of arable land available nationally fell by 92 million mu (23,784,000 square miles) or 5 per cent of the total surface, reducing 50 million peasants to the state of ‘three not-haves’: no land, no training, no social security (He 2007, 120). As a result, from being individual and temporary, rural–urban migration became increasingly familial and permanent (Froissart 2013, 211–13). Family migration represented 14 per cent of migrations in 2000 and 21 per cent in 2004 (State Council Research Group 2006, 77). Many migrants hence became de facto urban residents, even if they did not have the full right to be.

The emergence of this new proletariat directly challenged the legitimacy of the Communist Party and pushed the Hu–Wen government to publish, in 2003, Document No. 1, ‘Notice to Carry Out the Management of Urban Employment and Services to Peasant Workers in Cities’.¹⁰ This document represented a political shift: it recognised for the first time that China’s industrialisation should go hand in hand with urbanisation and invited the municipalities to guarantee equal rights to migrants and the urban population in terms of working conditions and access to employment, social welfare, training and education for their children. Without renouncing the control of migration, this document urged municipalities to work towards granting equal social and economic rights to migrants and urban residents. It clearly stated a new political priority: to integrate agricultural hukou holders into the cities. This document led to the implementation of public policies at the local level that directly modified the hukou system by allowing gradual integration of rural hukou holders into the cities, although still on an unequal basis.

A Tool for Planning Urbanisation

From the 1980s onwards, the hukou system was reformed to allow China to manage its urban transition in a gradual and controlled manner, while also reducing the costs of this transition for the state. From the very start, hukou reforms demonstrated the CCP’s intentions to promote balanced urbanisation by encouraging the development of lower-tier cities. They corresponded neatly to the slogan: ‘Strictly control the development of cities, rationally develop cities and vigorously promote the development of towns and villages’ (Davin 1999, 130).

The first reform of the hukou dates from 1984 with the establishment, only in small towns, of a ‘self-supply grain hukou’ (zili kouliang chengzhen hukou 自理口粮户口). Peasants could obtain an urban hukou for themselves and their immediate family on the condition that they could prove they had permanent lodging and employment and could supply themselves with food. Insofar as the state did not take charge of either their food rationing or their accommodation, and that there were far fewer social benefits for small town residents than for those in larger cities, the cost for the state of this sort of urbanisation was very low. The principle of an elitist urbanisation was subsequently set; those who had the means to finance their settlement in towns could acquire an urban status from then on.

The same model of integration at minimal cost for the state was gradually extended to small and medium-sized cities as the reforms enabled their economic growth. In 1997, a similar reform was launched in small cities (up to 200,000 inhabitants). Provincial authorities were asked to select a small number of urban units, below the level of the district administrative centre, where the economy and infrastructure were developed enough and financial resources were sufficient, and to fix quotas to accommodate migrants according to the city’s capacity. This policy, at first limited to 450 pilot locations, was extended to all small cities in 2001, and quotas were removed (Wu 2013). In 2003, some provinces, such as Sichuan, extended this reform to medium-sized cities (Froissart 2008). But the hurdles in the way to obtaining an urban hukou in the largest and most dynamic municipalities, where the migrant workers possessing nothing but their labour – in other words, the proletarians – were mostly likely to go, remained very high and only accessible to the most well-off and most qualified migrants, who were usually urban residents from other cities (Froissart 2008; Chan and Buckingham 2008).

The National New-Type Urbanisation Plan published by the State Affairs Council in 2014 followed the same logic.¹¹ It planned to attribute an urban hukou to 100 million people by 2020, by further relaxing the restrictions in place in small (fewer than 500,000 inhabitants) and medium-sized (from 500,000 to 1 million inhabitants) cities, while maintaining strict control on migration to cities of more than 5 million inhabitants. The conditions for obtaining an urban hukou became stricter as the size of the city increased.

In small cities, the requirements remained minimal, yet to the condition of having stable work and accommodation was added that of contributing to the urban social security system. Requirements also included, depending on the size and attractiveness of the municipality, the time spent living in the city and contributing to social security, the type and length of employment, the amount of tax paid and the type of accommodation (new or old, surface area, ownership or tenant). Lastly, cities of more than 5 million inhabitants were authorised to use a points-record system (jifen zhidu 积分制度), enabling them to select and welcome immigrants whose presence reinforced the relative advantages of these major economic centres,¹² while also limiting access to public services in order to control state spending.

In 2016 and 2019, the central government published new directives instructing municipalities with a population of 1–3 million inhabitants to remove restrictions to the issuance of urban hukou, and those of 3–5 million to speed up the integration of priority groups, particularly families arriving from the countryside.¹³ According to the National Development and Reform Commission, by the end of 2020, 100 million migrants from the countryside had transferred their hukou to a city. Also, municipalities of fewer than 3 million inhabitants had effectively abandoned their points-record system and were only taking into account the length of time an individual had been living in the city and their social security contributions when issuing an urban hukou.¹⁴ In February 2021, Jiangxi was the first province to announce the lifting of restrictions for the issue of an urban hukou, the only conditions retained being proof of employment, accommodation and a two- to three-year history of social insurance contributions according to the size of the city.¹⁵

By regularising migrants who had been living in urban settings for several years, these reforms aimed to extend the possibility for de facto residents to become fully-fledged residents in increasingly larger cities, while continuing to protect the largest cities. The reforms benefited a stable and well-off elite among rural migrants, particularly as obtaining an urban hukou implied giving up land in the countryside. However, in the big cities, which attracted most of the poorest migrants, central government policy allowed local development strategies to influence migration policy (Froissart 2008). As a result, while the urbanisation rate¹⁶ in China had quadrupled since the Mao era, amounting to 64 per cent in 2020, the percentage of people holding an urban hukou only reached 45 per cent.¹⁷

An Elitist and Differentiated Integration Model: Point-Based Citizenship

The hukou system was also modified by policies concerning access to urban public services for migrants that were put in place from the early 2000s onwards. Similarly to the process of urbanisation, the integration of migrants in cities had been undertaken in a pragmatic way rather than in a spirit of justice and equity. I demonstrate here that the so-called social policies¹⁸ (Qian, Hu and Su 2017) put in place by municipalities with a population exceeding 3 million inhabitants using a points-record system to control access to public services, and eventually to urban status, renew the principles of a functionalist and, therefore, stratified social citizenship. The nature of stratification is plural today. It extends a logic of status inherited from the hukou whereby ‘long-stay residents’ (changzhu renkou 常住人口)¹⁹ who do not possess an urban hukou can access certain basic public services but are not treated as equal to those with urban roots and migrants who do not have such a permit remain irremediably excluded. Added to this are the socioeconomic inequalities linked to market forces, which local government policies only reinforce by favouring educated and qualified migrants who represent a socioeconomic elite within the ‘long-stay resident’ category. Finally, by stressing eligibility rather than rights (Zhang 2012), these policies determine different levels of access to urban public services in proportion to the value of the beneficiary in the eyes of the state, hence the idea of citizenship by points. In other words, these policies continue to exclude the poorest and most mobile migrants and, at the same time, to create new types of inequality among long-stay migrants already in the cities.

Development of Public Services and the Creation of New Social Stratifications

Following the publication of Document No. 1 in 2003, the central government continued to reiterate its intention to disconnect access to public services in cities from the granting of an urban hukou.²⁰ The creation in 2015 of a long-term residence permit was a major turning point.²¹ It allowed access to public services, replacing the temporary residence permit that only established the legitimacy of staying in urban areas. However, the reforms were conducted in a decentralised manner, the municipalities implementing the directives from the centre according to their resources and needs, as the state bore no financial responsibility for the reforms. Even if from then on municipalities were required to take migrants into account in their spending – whereas previously the budget only took into account permanent residents – they undertook to limit the pressure on public finance. They were thus encouraged to select candidates for urban integration, to create different levels of integration and to favour the allocation of resources by the market.

From the early 2000s, the cities with the largest influx of migrants began to set up social protection systems. Each municipality developed its own model, but a common feature was that these systems were not based on taxation and redistribution. They were instead social insurance systems based on contributions indexed to salaries where the amount determined the benefits. Such systems strengthened the socioeconomic inequalities between city dwellers and migrants, with employers having less social responsibility towards migrants than their urban employees. In Shanghai, for example, employers contributed 5.5 per cent of the salary for their migrant employees and 12 per cent for urban hukou holders (Wu 2017, 132). Protection for these two categories of citizens remained very unequal, concerning both health and risk coverage, and the amount of eventual benefits received (Froissart 2013, 269–78). Also, even migrants covered by urban social insurance regimes were often obliged to return to the countryside for treatment or to forego treatment, as they lacked coverage for some conditions, in particular those requiring long-term treatment (Chan and O’Brien 2019; Müller 2016; Meng 2021). As they do not allow transfer of benefits, these localised contribution-based systems are not adapted for a mobile population, who lose their entitlement as soon as they move from the city where they have paid contributions. Moreover, these systems, with contributions based on salary, exclude most migrants who do not hold work contracts – 65 per cent of them in 2016.²²

The social insurance schemes specifically designed for migrant workers enable the integration of the most stable and affluent, but at the price of a double discrimination based on their place of hukou registration and income (not only do migrant workers have less coverage than urban residents, but the poor have less coverage than the more affluent). This social policy certainly contributes to the integration of elite migrant workers but still stigmatises them as a specific social category and further stratifies within this category. Thus, an elite minority of migrant workers has the means to contribute to the urban social insurance scheme; a larger group is covered by the specific scheme for migrant workers; and the majority of those working in the informal sector, or who are too poor or too mobile, have no social insurance.

When it comes to access to education, the reforms have been taken further to create a proper public service available to some children of migrant workers. The doors of urban schools remained closed to these children until 1998, when they were admitted on condition that their parents had the required documents, stable employment and accommodation, and paid ‘temporary schooling fees’ that actually made them bear the full cost of tuition. Illegal private schools sprang up during the late 1990s to assist these children. As these schools were run with limited means, they provided mediocre teaching, could not issue state-recognised diplomas, and often did not respect the required conditions of hygiene and security. The consequence of the 2004 abolition of the temporary schooling fees was the integration of an elite, once again to the exclusion of the poorest. On the one hand, this measure encouraged the state schools to reinforce their selection procedures along socioeconomic lines to avoid overcrowding. On the other hand, the central government’s instructions asking municipalities to prioritise the enrolment of these children in state schools was often used by local authorities as a pretext to shut down private schools, despite their efforts to gain recognition from the state (Froissart 2008). The repeated closures of private schools left tens of thousands of children without alternatives: either they separated from their parents and returned to the countryside or they put an end to their education. In 2006, 132 schools were closed in Beijing (of a total of 239 with 90,000 students) and 16 – some of which had more than 2,000 pupils – in Shanghai.²³

This integration model created four categories of children of migrant workers with unequal rights of access to education: first, those receiving the same education as urban residents but entailing administrative (presentation of permits and documents not required by urban residents) and socioeconomic (children of more affluent and qualified parents were privileged) discrimination; second, those enrolled in lawful private schools with higher enrolment fees and lesser learning conditions; third, the majority of children from poor mobile families who remained educated in illegal schools, which, in the absence of subsidies and adequate supervision, charged very high fees, could not issue qualifications and were constantly threatened with closure; last, the children separated from their parents and remaining in the countryside, where schooling was of even lesser quality (Froissart 2008, 2013). In 2017, roughly 45 per cent of migrant workers’ children were still enrolled in country schools and could not join their parents in the cities.²⁴

The Points-Record System: Greater Inclusion at the Cost of Increased Stratification

The creation of a points-record system in several cities in Guangdong around 2010 made it possible to systemise the logics of inclusion detailed above and to structure a coherent range of reforms. This system awarded points to all residence permit holders according to socioeconomic criteria and their respect of state directives. A migrant worker could obtain an urban hukou – and thus enjoy full citizenship in his city of residence – if he acquired sufficient points and if his application fell within the annual fixed quotas for each municipality. If he did not satisfy the criteria, he could obtain partial urban citizenship with access only to certain administrative and health services, education for his child, training and housing aid. Institutionalised at the provincial level in 2011, this system was gradually extended to cities with a population of between 1 and 3 million inhabitants from 2014 onwards, and to municipalities such as Shanghai (2014) and Beijing (2018). In other words, this system concerned cities where GDP per resident was the highest in China and enabled the control of the quantity and personal ‘quality’ (sushi 素质) of the migrant workers to reduce the cost to the state of their inclusion and to maximise their contribution to economic development.

Points were awarded according to a three-tiered system. The first level of criteria was common to all cities and corresponded to basic requirements: proof of a constant record of residence, long-term employment and accommodation, and uninterrupted contributions to social security. Young and healthy people were preferred as being less costly for the state and for social insurance; older people (men over 50 and women over 40) must have contributed to social insurance for longer (a minimum of 10 years). Breaking the law in any way entailed points being removed, and any implication in criminal activity resulted in disqualification. The second and third levels of criteria, which could award more points, reflected the skills and qualifications required by each municipality according to economic priorities. The second level of criteria was related to the applicants’ personal quality, mainly their level of education, qualifications and professional competences, and reputation (e.g. a healthy bank account and no debt). The application had to be sponsored by the employer, whose respect for employment law and corporate social responsibility were also considered. By awarding points according to the employer, municipalities used hukou attribution to strengthen industrial and business sectors in need of highly qualified personnel, to support projects that helped to increase the city’s competitiveness, and to implement top-down plans and political directives. The third level of criteria (so-called merit-based) included how much had been invested in the local economy or the amount of tax paid, as well as the honours and awards received in local competitions. Bonus points could be won through voluntary participation in philanthropic activities or related donations.

While remaining within the logic of a selective immigration favouring a qualified socioeconomic elite among the migrants, this system represented a more inclusive policy through a tiered integration system based on the number of points gained. It allowed migrants who were not eligible for urban hukou to benefit from certain redistributive advantages, such as access to local schools. It also established a more predictable route for obtaining an urban hukou. While a very small elite group of highly qualified applicants obtained urban hukou each year (Zhang 2012; Losavio 2019), this system continued to exclude poor and mobile migrants without a residence permit and created new stratifications within the category of ‘long-term residents’ (changzhu renkou 常住人口). The number of points obtained determined the quality of accessible services.

Let us take the example of access to education. In 2016 in Zhuhai, three times as many points (118) were needed to enrol in a primary school in the most affluent area, where the quality of education was considered better, compared to the poorest district on the edge of town (42 points).²⁵ However, acquiring so many points remained beyond the reach of most migrants. Between 2012 and 2015, the Dongguan municipality allotted annually between 20,200 and 28,300 places in local state schools for the 700,000 migrant children of school age (Guo and Liang 2017, 781). In other words, despite a slight increase over the period, the number of places in these schools remained clearly insufficient. Therefore, most migrant children in Dongguan remained enrolled in private schools. If we follow official figures, Dongguan is an exception, as, at the national level, 70 to 80 per cent of children of migrant workers were enrolled in local state schools during that time period (Friedman 2018).²⁶ However, as Friedman notes, these children had to win the privilege of being enrolled in such schools. Also, as cities only provided places to migrant workers’ children for compulsory schooling years, to pursue secondary education they had to enrol in private schools or return to the countryside.

This system has made the hukou system more flexible while retaining its main features. First, it is a population management tool enabling the state to maintain its control over migrants by making the respect of their obligations a condition of their rights: for example, by registering with the police;²⁷ paying taxes, social contributions and debts; and conforming socially and becoming sedentary.²⁸ Second, this population management tool is intended to serve urban economic development strategies. As a means of selecting migrants, it is similar to systems put in place in Western countries regarding the nationalisation of foreign economic migrants (Zhang 2012). It allows the most prosperous cities in the country to further reinforce their competitiveness by selecting the human resources required to advance their position in the national, and international, economic race. Like the hukou under Mao, the points-record system favours a selected elite expected to carry urban economic development forward.

Although many cities with a population of 1–3 million have now abolished the points-record system,²⁹ the procedure to access public services remains the same. These services are divided into non-exclusive public services (feipaitaxing gonggong fuwu 非排他性公共服务) open to all, such as certain health care services (i.e. vaccination), culture or sport; and exclusive public services (paitaxing gongong fuwu 排他性公共服务) that remain conditional, such as education, accommodation, aid for starting businesses and services for the disabled.³⁰ As far as access to education is concerned, municipalities or employers pre-empt places in the local state schools for the children of ‘workers coming from outside’ (wailai wugongrenyuan 外来务工人员) whom they hope to attract. The remaining places are allocated to children whose parents satisfy certain criteria in terms of length of residence, employment and social security contributions (Wu and Li 2016). As outlined by Friedman (2018, 503), ‘migrants are granted access to local citizenship and public education for their children if they can fulfil a specific, state-determined, need in the labour market’. Also, the available public housing rarely fits the needs of migrant workers, as they are often situated in areas on the edge of town, far from the migrants’ workplace and the dormitories do not provide any privacy for families (Lou 2020). The unsuitability of the public services offered to migrants was also underlined in several studies addressing professional training (Guo and Liang 2017; Shi, Fang and Gao 2021).

The abolition of the points-record system does not imply greater access to public services for migrants. According to a 2018 study across 86 prefectural and provincial capitals, even if 82.42 per cent of public services were (theoretically) available for the migrant population, 45 per cent of rural migrants could not satisfy the conditions of access established by the municipalities and would, therefore, be excluded. This percentage rises to 55.85 per cent in one-quarter of these 86 cities where conditions were most strict. Also, judging from their GDP, the cities that have the greatest capacity to provide public services, and that also attract the greatest number of migrants, are those that provide the least (Qian and Song 2020). Thus, in the most dynamic cities in the country, migrants are still mostly considered necessary contributors to economic development without having the right to reap the benefices of growth. In these cities, far from promoting more justice and equity, reforms have contributed to the maintenance of a reserve of cheap labour for the urban economy, because the migrant labour force remains disenfranchised.

Conclusion

Throughout the history of the PRC, the maintenance and the adaption of the hukou, including reforms that modified and extended it, such as the points-record system, has played a crucial role in the modernisation of China. This system has allowed the CCP to control, plan and balance the urbanisation process by favouring the development of small towns and gradually promoting the urbanisation of larger cities, while keeping strict control of growth in the biggest cities. The hukou has constantly underpinned the economic development of the country, while allowing the state to limit spending. Development was built on the exploitation of peasants during the Mao era, and then on migrant workers in the reform period. At present, while the points-record system enables the most dynamic cities to attract, select and settle the migrants that suit their economic development strategy, and to regulate access to public services as they develop, the poorest, least educated and most mobile migrants continue to represent a cheap labour force in these same urban areas, where they are deprived of rights.

These reforms have not been implemented in a spirit of equity and social justice but of pragmatism and utilitarianism. To the extent that the state considers its resources limited, it has always sought to limit expenditure and to favour certain citizens, at present the affluent and competent because they contribute to the creation of wealth. These reforms, therefore, highlight the eligibility of migrant workers rather than their rights. Accommodation, employment and social security are not considered to be rights but rather the conditions of access to public services and, ultimately, to urban status that continues to favour a socioeconomic elite. Access to public services represents an award given by municipalities to individuals corresponding to their selection criteria. In the largest and most dynamic cities in the country, the extent and quality of the services are then proportional to the value of the beneficiary in the eyes of the local government. In this sense, the reforms re-established the logic of a functionalist social citizenship, whereby the advantages that individuals may enjoy depend on their contribution to urban economic development. Favouring the interests of the state over the rights of the individual, these reforms re-establish the principle of stratified social citizenship. At present, this stratification is both the product of the differences in status inherited from the Mao era (the native urban population continuing to be favoured over urban residents recently arrived from the countryside) and of socioeconomic inequalities that state policies reinforce rather than seek to correct.

In the end, these reforms do not challenge the principle of a local social citizenship. In urban areas, the amount of social insurance benefits and the quality of the care provided are conditioned by the place of residence registration. Moreover, the fact that migrant settlement policies are implemented at a local level and do not imply the transfer of entitlements constitutes a hindrance to individual mobility. As entitlements remain attached to the place of residence and not to individuals, migration always implies the loss of entitlements. Finally, the hukou remains a powerful tool for social control; apart from enabling the state to compel Chinese citizens to settle and migrants to register with the police, it also encourages them to socially conform by rewarding respect of the law and family planning rules, civic responsibility (paying taxes, joining in charity work, etc.), property ownership, education and qualifications. In other words, the logic of hukou attribution means that social citizenship is reserved for exemplary citizens.

The dynamic for access to social citizenship implemented by the CCP followed an inverse logic to that presiding over the creation of the welfare state. Based on the recognition of the intrinsic value of the individual, the final aim of the welfare state is, in theory, to guarantee the dignity of all members of a given society – that is, to ensure a modicum of economic welfare and security for all citizens according to the level of development of the society in which they are living (Marshall 1981). Integration proceeds from the base to the summit of the social pyramid: social policies apply first to the poorest and least educated. The state guarantees a level of equality – or a universal minimum – beyond which inequalities can develop. In China, conditional and elitist access to the urban hukou creates a quasi-Darwinian competition between individuals. Social inclusion proceeds from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid, the state reaching out to the most affluent according to a particularistic logic and creating exceptional statuses by granting privileges and excluding the poorest and the least educated. In this, far from correcting the existing inequalities, the action of the state contributes to their increase, thus enabling the creation of social classes.

It is true that these reforms have helped to improve the wellbeing of part of the population. In the cities, they tend to reduce the divide between urban hukou holders and long-term residents. But polarisation remains strong between those who have and have not been granted a residence permit. It is certain that migrants from the countryside in central and western China who have worked for years in the cities enjoy an improved standard of living when they are granted a hukou in a small or medium-sized city in an interior province. But those who still work in the 14 metropolises, where the conditions for access to public services and to the urban hukou remain most strict, have not seen substantial improvement in their daily life. The Party’s promise is that, in the end, these inequalities can be levelled and that all Chinese will have access to prosperity, which will then be common to all. The sacrifice of the peasants and the migrants throughout the history of the PRC will then be justified. Yet, the practical challenges are considerable: improvements in the offer and the quality of public services; greater suitability of these services to needs; and harmonisation of the different urban social insurance systems, including between urban and rural settings. Beyond this, it is certain that the overwhelming challenge for the Party is to consider that rights are inherent to the individual, and not attached to particular qualities.

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