Hukou: The System That Shapes Internal Migration in China
In Discussion with Dr. Charlotte Goodburn, Deputy Director of the Lau China Institute and Reader in Chinese Politics at King’s College London
Established in 1958, China’s household registration system, the hukou, initially assigned a rural (agricultural) or urban (non-agricultural) status to every citizen (Fu & Ren, 2010). Although the agricultural vs. non-agricultural distinction was abolished in 2014, the place of registration still determines access to state provisions, thereby controlling citizens’ access to social rights and public services. Established in 1958, the hukou aimed at limiting rural-to-urban migration to keep grain prices low enough to support China’s industrialization process. Following the 1980s economic reforms, experts have observed mass migration movements to growing megacities. Between 1980s and 2010, China’s urban population grew from one fifth of the total population to more than half (Pizzi & Hu, 2022). Since the late 1990s, small cities’ governments have significantly reformed the system to ease access to their local hukou in the hope of increasing their local population growth. On the other hand, big cities want to limit their population growth by maintaining strict requirements for gaining local hukou.
Dr. Charlotte Goodburn, Deputy Director of the Lau China Institute – Reader in Chinese Politics (King’s College London) sheds light on the current dynamics of the hukou system and its impact on the identity of internal migrants in China. This discussion highlights the complexities of controlling migration, despite the enforcement of deterring systems like the Chinese hukou.
Today, how is the hukou system shaping patterns of internal migration?
There are currently two countervailing dynamics occurring simultaneously.The first important pattern is that, at least since 2014, we have seen increasing liberalization at the bottom and restriction at the top. So what this means in practice is that many small to medium-sized cities have eased the rules for settlement. Migrant workers can settle in those cities more easily and can get access to a hukou, through residence points, permit schemes, point systems, with lower thresholds needed in terms of jobs and education. At the same time, megacities and big provincial capitals have tightened up their immigration with requirements on education, skills, age limits, personal wealth, and various other kinds of contributions. The first pattern that we see is a redirection of flows away from the big first tier cities and megacities, towards city clusters and county-level cities, and more migration inside provinces, intraprovincial rather than interprovincial migration, because we’re seeing movements to relatively smaller places. So that’s the first kind of trend.
How about the second pattern?
At the same time, China has observed a selective shift from circular migration, a temporary kind of labour, towards longer-term family migration – but only for some families and some cities. The kinds of barriers that exist for those who don’t have a local hukou in the city, to things like schooling and low-cost housing, still push part of the workforce into moving between places, circulatory or split-householding strategies where you have the parents migrating, but the children and the old people remaining behind in the village. But at the same time, for those in smaller cities where basic services have been delinked from hukou, you see more family co-residence, families moving together, longer durations of stay in the city, and much higher intention for settling. In the megacities, we haven’t seen that kind of shift: only the wealthiest, most educated, most “desirable” migrants, if you like, are able actually to bring their families and to settle.
Overall, the hukou system is not preventing migration, but is kind of “sorting” migrants. It is enabling cities to be very selective about which kinds of migrants they want to keep and which they don’t, by sorting them by skill, life stage, career, destination, tier of city… It shapes who settles where and on what terms they can settle rather than outright preventing migration or insisting on migration to a particular place.
Pizzi and Hu (2022, p.1053) state that: ‘Cities undertaking hukou reform must balance migrants’ contributions to the local economy with the burden that expanded migrant access to public services and other social welfare benefits would place on public finances’. When we study migration, we also have the perspective of the economic participation of migrants, so in the situation of the hukou system, does it not outweigh their expenses on public finances?
Yes, absolutely. It does and that goes for migrants everywhere, their contribution is usually more significant than the cost. But in the Chinese case, there are very specific kinds of circumstances which make it difficult for cities to take advantage of that. Migrants tend to be net contributors to their destinations: they’re usually young, disproportionately healthy, disproportionately skilled. They’re in work and they pay taxes, obviously, of various forms, consumption taxes, certainly. They contribute to profits and land lease demand in urban rental markets. They are typically under-enrolled in things like social insurance, and they are underserved across the whole spectrum of public benefits… So, they typically contribute a lot more than they receive locally.
Why does the Hukou system not benefit cities in China?
One problem is that China is a very fiscally decentralized country, where there are not enough redistributive mechanisms from the centre to the localities. So the cities, if they let in a lot of migrants, are very afraid of future liabilities, even though they are earning money from those young working age migrants now.. This is reinforced by weak portability mechanisms and an agglomeration of tax revenues accrued to the central government, inadequately redistributed on the basis of migrants relocations. Ultimately, it’s a concern for local governments in terms of affording these kinds of costs for migrant dependents.
There’s also a second mechanism, which is not economic, and that’s about how the officials in China’s political system are evaluated. They are evaluated through the “cadre evaluation system”, and if they get a lot of points in this system, they’re likely to get promoted and have a prominent career as a Chinese official. If they don’t get the points they might get demoted or kicked out. Much of that system is based on how well they provide for their locally registered population, their local hukou-holders. So, how well they provide for the migrants is not important, because they are not being assessed on how well they provide for those who aren’t formally registered. Then, of course, officials’ main concern is on whether or not they have the resources and budget to keep their local hukou-holders happy, because that’s what’s going to get them the high scores on their cadre evaluation.
In the 1980s, China’s urban population represented one fifth of the country’s total population. By 2010, the urban population represented half of the total population, despite the enforcement of the hukou system. Has the hukou proved to be successful?
It depends on what you mean by success and how we are measuring it. We need to think a little bit about what the hukou system was set out to do – it wasn’t set up as a migration restriction mechanism, not primarily. It was set up in the 50s as a way of monitoring individuals of concern to the state, a way of enabling grain rationing by ensuring a rural labour reserve adequate to support heavy-industry led development in the cities, and to ensure that state welfare could be provided to those who it was intended to go to… And in that sense, it was extremely successful!
What about for migration?
In migration terms, I suppose it was also successful in limiting the formation of large urban slums during the earlier industrialization period. But if you think about the Reform Era post 1978, it is a much more mixed picture, and a lot of people now see it as problematic. This has produced a form of dual citizenship within the cities, with a segmented labour market, migrants with restricted access to education and healthcare and housing. It also has an intergenerational effect with left-behind children and left-behind elderly. These kinds of constraints are not just problematic in terms of the rights of those affected, but also in terms of things like the misallocation of talent or the depression of human capital investment, or the ability of cities, let’s say, to attract and keep the people that they really need.
What do you think are aspects of the hukou that need to be changed in order for it to be successful in the future?
The first and most important challenge is to ensure a full proper decoupling of basic public services from hukou status. China needs a system in which universal compulsory education and primary healthcare coverage is based on where you live, not where you’re registered.
Second, it must secure proper portability, so that if a citizen acquires benefits or welfare or social insurance payments for pensions in one place, they can easily transfer their benefits to their new place of residence.
Third, it needs a reformed intergovernmental finance system that aligns funding from the centre with the obligations of cities to provide services for in-migrants, that reallocates that funding. When it collects tax revenue, it needs to give it out in proportion to what those cities need to do. But that would be very complex.
Fourth, it needs a transparent, non-exclusionary set of settlement criteria for migrants to settle in large cities. If we think about a comparison with international migration, in terms of settlement and policies for bringing dependents; nothing like this really exists in the context of the hukou system. So, it needs those kinds of things.
Finally, it also needs a land and housing policy change, to expand the supply of decent low-cost rental and starter housing. This would avoid migrants from being excluded on price; and that also thinks about the rural land issue. At the moment, the possession of a local hukou in a rural village is what entitles people to land in that village. And for a lot of them moving to the city, they don’t want to lose that rural land. They might like an urban hukou, but the rural land is their safety net.So somehow decoupling hukou status from land ownership is going to be needed. It will be a huge and difficult thing to do, but it’s going to be necessary at some point.
Scholars, including Pizzi and Hu (2022), argue that the hukou doesn’t really limit migration but limits access to urban citizenship. They also argue it’s a tool affecting social stratification. How is it affecting internal migrants’ identity?
They’re second-class citizens in the cities. It changes their civic identity, and it has intergenerational effects: you might have been born in the city, maybe if you’re the children of migrant parents, but your hukou is still registered in the village, so you feel like a second-class citizen, you don’t have full access to the resources. It has a huge effect.
But there’s a really important point that needs to be emphasized here, which is that it’s not just the hukou that does that. India faces the same problem, but they don’t have a hukou system. If a poor migrant from rural Bihar comes to live and work in Delhi, they don’t have access to many of those services either. They don’t have any restrictions on mobility or a hukou document in India, but the cities ask for registered proof of local address. India has an ID system called Aadhaar, which has to be registered to a certain address. So, they say, “Right, show us your Aadhaar card and what address it has. Ah, it’s not registered to a Delhi address! We can’t let you join this health scheme. We can’t give you access to this benefit”. Here’s a country with no history of anything like hukou doing exactly the same kind of thing.
That’s important, because it shows that the hukou is just the mechanism and not the cause. The cause, in contemporary China, is that megacities want to keep out migrants they think are undesirable. They want the wealthy, professional,and talented migrants, not the poor, rural, and lower skilled ones. So, in India, they use registered address, while in China, they use the hukou system. Large, decentralized systems – like India as a federal country, and China as a fiscally decentralized country – with big disparities between rural and urban (or between one part of the country and another) make mechanisms to keep out “undesirable” migrants from the places where they don’t want them.
So overall, is migration a form of mobility that can actually be prevented and completely stopped?
No, migration definitely cannot be stopped. If you think about the hukou, even in the 50s, 60s, and 70s when it was entirely enforced, people were still moving.And that was not just hukou alone, of course, then – that was in tandem with other institutions like neighbourhood residence committees monitoring who’s coming in. The whole socialist infrastructure that prevented people from going places didn’t actually stop people from going there.
Where you have economic differences, where the wages are much higher over there, people will want to go there. Where the culture has many more opportunities or educational resources, people will want to go there. People will adapt strategies – split householding, certain people moving, temporary guest labour, circularity, informal movement, all of these things. And of course, there’s demand too. The cities want those people. Actually, if you stopped movement, the cities would really lose out: they need that labour. What they don’t want is the long-term settlement that’s going to cost them money. So, they want migrants to be temporary workers there. But in reality, temporary work often seems to lead to long-term settlement, especially when you make policies very restrictive, so that people can’t easily keep coming and going.
Ultimately, Dr. Goodburn’s analysis demonstrates that migration cannot be prevented, despite the enforcement of deterring systems like the Chinese hukou. The system significantly impacts in-migrants as they become second-class citizens and are significantly restricted in their access to social rights and public services.
References
Fu, Q., & Ren, Q. (2010). Educational Inequality under China’s Rural–Urban Divide: The Hukou System and Return to Education. Environment and Planning. A, 42(3), 592–610. https://doi.org/10.1068/a42101
Pizzi, E., & Hu, Y. (2022). Does Governmental Policy Shape Migration Decisions? The Case of China’s Hukou System. Modern China, 48(5), 1050–1079. https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221087426
Contributors
Dr. Charlotte Goodburn is the Deputy Director of the Lau China Institute and a Reader in Chinese Politics at King’s College London. To learn more about her research on the Hukou System:
Residence_permits_and_points_systems_Dong_and_Goodburn_2019_JCC.pdf
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