Speaker 2
So today we'll be talking about Sam's just released book called Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship. This book examines China's household registration, or hukou system. This system is used to determine who is entitled to access jobs, housing, medical care, education, and other social services, depending on where they were born in China. The system has been relaxed in recent years, but still plays a crucial role in everyone's life in China and serves as an important tool of social control and social policy. However, this is no longer a uniform totalitarian system imposed from Beijing. Instead, local governments get to choose whether and how to change the rules in their jurisdictions. And there's a lot of variation in this, which is where this book comes in. So Sam, since not everyone listening to this knows a lot about China, let's start with the basics before we plunge into your own research. So could you quickly walk us through the role of the Huco system under the sort of classic planned economy?
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. So the Huco system has imperial legacies. So there's been a household registration system in China for a very long time, to say the least. But the modern Hu-Ho system was implemented in the 1950s as a way of managing labor and managing the dual economy of the urban spaces and the rural cooperatives. And so in order to implement the command economy and really have that really large state creating the command economy and dictating what was going to be produced where and when. They also needed to know where people were, both to ensure that the factories were staffed and to do redistribution as well, provide that government rations of food and the rations of the industrial products that they were were creating were being sent where they were so the modern hukou system designated people as a specific locality or from a specific locality and as either agricultural or non-agricultural we usually refer to that as urban and rural, though it starts to get really complicated in the system today. But being urban meant that you were attached to an urban work unit and the local government provided you government services, things like health care, housing, and also provided food rations. Whereas if you were rural or agricultural, it meant you were attached to an agricultural collective. And that collective was responsible for ensuring that you had food from the local production and whatnot. There's also a bureaucratic level of governance here in terms of some areas, because they had a large population, were officially designated as urban and areas that were smaller were designated as rural. But largely, this was your connection to your work unit, that core definition, that core unit of production in the Mao era while trying to implement the command economy. And one other, sorry, one other important thing is that in order to, you have this identity and this tie to a place, and you were not legally allowed to move. So in order to keep people in their places of production and in their place of consumption, migration across boundaries or from rural to urban was not allowed. Or even from urban to urban spaces was not allowed unless the central government approved of it. So it happened for government bureaucrats and for labor distribution, but internal migration was severely controlled in this period in order to implement that centrally controlled command economy. Right.
Speaker 2
So yeah, so because it was planned, you couldn't just sort of look for a job in the city and say, hey, they've got better healthcare. Why don't I take this job? You were stuck on that farm. And I guess hypothetically, if you would have been foolish enough to want to leave the city and move to the countryside, then maybe they would have stopped you, although that seemed to be a less common aspiration. Okay, so then that was kind of the classic command economy system. And how did it evolve in the post-Mao era as there were more sort of marketizing reforms being introduced? Yeah,
Speaker 1
well, even in the late Mao period, this internal migration started to pick up. People found ways around the system, and there were all sorts of kind of innovations in the the hulkal system including things like the self-supplied grain hulkal which allowed people from rural areas to take on urban jobs to move to urban areas and take on urban jobs but didn't have entitlements to grain rations from the government so essentially you brought your food with you um and this kind of migration was tolerated especially early on because the uh factories needed labor uh at this time there was a huge population imbalance the country was very very rural and there was massive rural under employment uh where there were just a lot of people in the agricultural fields, many more than were needed to cultivate the land. And during reform and opening, and as the central government really shifted towards market mechanisms and allowing some market forces into the economy, then people were needed in the factories and people were needed in the cities. And so it necessitated a change to the hukou system. And the first thing that started to break down there was that migration element, was that the hukou system remained the same, but you could actually move. You could leave your place of registration. Your hukou identity stayed the same so you would move um but your identity would stay the same and this was followed by removing restrictions on on grains on employment eventually on housing as well. But a lot of the social welfare systems that had been built both during the Mao era and the post-Mao era were really kind of segregated and divided in this urban and rural kind of dichotomy, the dual economy. And also by locality, especially with financial reforms in the early 1990s. The financial requirements for providing things like education and healthcare were shifted down the bureaucratic hierarchy to local governments. And those systems were built on the hukou system, with this hukou system in mind, that we have a permanent population. They are urban and they are rural. And then our local resources really go to those different people in different systems. So we have this this parallel of social welfare distribution throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. It doesn't really start to break down until really the last 10 years or so in an attempt to reform the system.
Speaker 2
So I guess it's kind of like a lot of the reforms at that time. You could keep what you had or were entitled to under the old system, but if you were willing to sort of take the risk and, you know, could make your way in the market side of the economy, then whatever you were able to generate and purchase through the market economy, you could sort of do. But the things that were still socialized, like hospitals, good most housing, education, that was all still just reserved to people who were locals there so then um so your your book is is called manipulating authoritarian citizenship and i think that's a good thing to highlight at this point like you're not talking about citizenship like what does it mean to be chinese but like really to be a citizen of i am a could be like a rural citizen of shanghai for instance or I guess maybe even a sub part of Shanghai. So one analogy that I used to use with students, and I'm curious to hear your take on like, in what ways it is a good or bad analogy is that it reminded me a lot, you know, when I learned about this of sort of how undocumented workers are in California, their sort of status, like you could be around the edges, but you were kind of always, you know, could be deported if someone decided they didn't want you there, you weren't. I mean, this is again, we've, you know, the policies in California have changed over the years, but like, you wouldn't necessarily be entitled to, you know, any any kind of public services if, if the local government didn't want to give it to you. So so how good or bad is that? Or like, what would how might that? What parts are accurate? Is there any ways in which that analogy would lead you astray? Yeah,
Speaker 1
so I would say that that analogy is a little bit more extreme. The case of undocumented immigrants in California, there are kind of more consequences to not having documentation. Because the internal migrants in China are indeed still internal migrants, right? They're still Chinese, they still have that Chinese identity. The one of the differences is that most of these migrant workers, the internal migrant workers, still have access to services at home that's within the same country, right? And so crossing that international boundary, I think, kind of takes it up a step. But their contingency is definitely kind of still there. the uh lack of local power especially if you if you read um like essays written by internal migrant workers or i remember reading testimonials from women during china's kind of short-lived me too movement about like i have no hukou here i have no power um that type of separation from the mainstream, I do think has analogies to the US case. But that crossing of international borders is definitely a major issue. where it might come up a little bit more is um for the black who calls the hey who um which is the population that doesn't have any who call uh so approximately one percent of the total population in China doesn't have any full call uh now the majority of those are children born in violation of the one child policy or the family planning policies or children of migrants who face barriers to like actually getting their children registered. And so the this population, the Hei Hu population, has no claim on government services anywhere within China. There have been a couple of policies trying to get this population kind of registered retroactively. But especially for young children and access to things like early healthcare interventions, vaccines, early education. It definitely still has an impact. So
Speaker 2
they would have trouble even if they, even if they did go back to their home village or. Because
Speaker 1
they don't have a home village.
Speaker 2
Their parents did. So their parents moved to the city, but then because they weren't born in the home village, no one's really registered them there or, or, or they were born illegally because of the one child policy. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So their parents had some sort of barrier to getting them registered in the first place, whether it was the one child policy and they didn't have the money to, to pay the fees or they were just hidden because that happened a lot. Or technically the rules are that you have to register for whole call within one month of birth. And sometimes you can't send a family proxy. And if you're across the country working, then you can't necessarily, like all of your time is for giving birth. You can't necessarily hop on a train and get home and register your child. And then if you go past that limit, then now you have extra paperwork. Now you have extra things that are required to show that this child is yours and it belongs to this particular locality. Okay.
Speaker 2
But I guess pushing the analogy still, I mean, even, you know, in the, at least through the nineties, like there were still stories about like, you know, there'd be a whole community of people from one part of the country living in an outskirt of Beijing. And then the Beijing government would decide it didn't want them there. And it would just like bulldoze the entire district because it wasn't normal housing. They didn't have a right to live there and just kind of like chase them off in a way that you know does sort of have a flavor of you know some people's desire to deport you know people from here or anyway you know the fact that they they lack those those rights so they don't formally have you know a clear a clear uh yeah right to be in that part of the country or like, you know, other cases where they would throw people in jail because they didn't have papers and a job in the local area. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So there, there are two different things here. One, I have two, two different things to add here. One is that, you know, the bulldozing of migrant villages just happened in 2017. Tens of thousands of internal migrants were left without housing um over the course of a week um i was i mean you know lucky enough that i i happened to be in beijing right after this happened and knew some people who lost their housing um in this uh very thinly veiled uh-fire safety campaign. And they were given maybe 36 hours notice. Some of them were able to get rent back, but some of them weren't. And then all these WeChat groups that popped up to provide temporary shelter for people who became hopeless overnight, or even like winter coats were scrubbed off of WeChat and censored out because the government was just trying to push people out. So that tenuous nature is definitely there. We also saw the interaction with detention and the very formal detention especially in the 1990s under the custody and repatriation centers. So this was a branch of the local security that was very specifically trying to keep kind of unregistered local migrants out of the city. And it was to kind of identify people without jobs, without paperwork, without a livelihood, and send them home to their villages. So that kind of anti-foreign, in quotation marks, the anti-non sentiment was definitely there. And those centers, I think at their peak, it's estimated that they detained somewhere between one and two million people just simply for not having paperwork. Chinese politics, you'd see big roundups right before inspections to get people off of the street. And so just not having your paperwork with you was justification for detaining you. Now, these centers and this whole branch of the security apparatus was dismantled in 2003 after it became very public that a white collar worker was was beaten to death in custody. He had a heart attack, according to official reports. But again, pretty thinly veiled violence in these detention centers purely because his paperwork was at home with his family. And the local officials were trying to extract fines from him.
