A Tripartite Alliance for Hukou Reform

The Chinese hukou system, or household registration system, has long been criticized as a sort of caste system that divides one country into two societies—rural and urban. While urban residents are privileged to have access to a wide range of social services in the cities, including healthcare, insurance, education, and welfare housing, rural immigrants have no access to such benefits. The attachment of rural hukou to land rights further complicates the problem, as switching from rural to urban hukou usually comes at the price of forsaking the land.

A hukou is a record in the system of household registration that is required by law in China. A household registration record officially identifies a person as a resident of an area and includes identifying information, such as name, parents, spouse, and date of birth. Rural and urban residents have different hukou statuses that provide them with different welfare and benefits.

Proponents for reform argue that a uniform hukou system will improve immigrant workers’ rights while alleviating social discrimination. In Beyond the Countryside: Hukou Reform and Agrarian Capitalism in China, Shaohua Zhan and Joel Andreas bring the perspective of agrarian studies into the debate over the future of the hukou system. They argue that, although earlier hukou reforms benefited rural residents by allowing them to seek employment and business opportunities in the city, recent hukou reforms have served as a wheel of agrarian capitalism, the purpose of which is to lure or force rural residents to leave land for city and to open up the countryside for agrarian capital.

By comparing two rounds of hukou reforms in the 1990s and 2000s, the paper identifies three interest groups that determine hukou reform trends—city government, urban-industrial capital, and agrarian capital. The authors also discuss the resistance of rural residents triggered by land grabbing that comes hand-in-hand with hukou reforms.

The hukou reform of the 1990s, led by the central government, aimed to promote non-farm activities of rural households and the transfer of surplus from rural populations to small cities and towns. It was met with strong opposition from city governments because rural immigrants were viewed as additional burdens of urban public expenditure. Strangely, things later turned 180 degrees when the government of medium-sized and large cities, the exact group that opposed the same policy a decade prior, became the very initiator and orchestrator for reform in the 2000s. The government formed a tripartite alliance with urban-industrial and agrarian capital to push forward a reform based on their common interest—a desire to separate land rights from hukou status so that land could be expropriated for better economic use.

In the mid 1990s, as local governments relied more heavily on land granting for revenue generation, urban interests emerged as a new force in hukou reform. By expropriating and selling rural land to developers, urban governments took in considerable amounts of revenue. In this process of land urbanization, rural residents and immigrants also became consumers of urban real estate, which helped boost the real estate market further.

Thanks to the increasing profitability of agriculture, agrarian capital also joined the land transformation carnival. Agricultural companies contracted land back from peasants by offering them a certain amount of money—a model called “reverse contracting.”

Contrary to the popular belief that peasants would prefer urban to rural hukou, most rural residents and migrant workers do not want to give up their rural hukou because rural hukou is associated with land rights and defines a person’s membership in the village. In addition, the benefits of holding an urban hukou have diminished considerably since the late 1990s.

Such resistance of peasants to hukou reforms motivated local governments to take rural land by force. They did this in the name of urban planning, by forcing peasants to exchange their land for an urban hukou or gradually detaching peasants from their land.

According to Zhan and Andreas, between 2004 and 2013, the central government had approved 4.7 million hectares of land to be used for urban and industrial construction, among which 3.3 million were agricultural land, accounting for 68.6 percent. Up to 100 million peasants lost their land, which became a headache for local government because these peasants claimed land rights when their land was expropriated.

Struggles between the tripartite alliance and peasants reflected a historical problem in Chinese society: a vaguely defined and weakly protected property rights system. Too often, personal properties are sacrificed for the sake of economic development, and the measures people can take to protect what belongs to them are too limited. From that perspective, the true injustice of Chinese society lies in the procedure of enforcement, rather than in the distribution of wealth.

Article Source: Beyond the Countryside: Hukou Reform and Agrarian Capitalism in China. Shaohua Zhan and Joel Andreas. International Academic Conference Paper No.7, Chiang Mai University (May 6^th 2015)

Feature Photo: cc/(Aaron Reiss)