The current household registration (hukou) system in China was created in the early 1950s. As a socio-economic institution, it experienced huge changes during the past half-century, from being extremely important in socio-economic activity during the period of the planned economy (before 1978), to an ordinary administrative system but with diminished importance in the reform era (after 1978). Correspondingly, the reliability of the statistics derived from the hukou system was also greatly affected.
The hukou system has a long history in China, and can be dated back to as early as 1,100-700 B.C. (Zhang 1988). Over millennia and cyclical dynasty changes, it mainly served administrative purposes such as population statistics, tax collection and military mobilisation. Shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic, the central government re-established the hukou system in cities in 1951 and then extended the system to rural areas after the 1953 census. Initially, it was designed for considerations of public security to monitor, rather than control, population distribution and movement (Cheng and Selden 1994), which was the reason why the Ministry of Public Security was charged with the registration system. But it gradually emerged as a priority to control the large number of peasants migrating to the cities following the rapid industrialisation in the late 1950s. In 1958 the People’s Congress enacted the Regulations of Household Registration, which legally stipulated the relevant principles and registration procedures. The hukou system is still in operation for the time being, although it has experienced several modifications, primarily the relaxation of the control over rural-urban migration, since the early 1980s (Mallee 1995; Wang 1997).
Under the hukou system, every Chinese citizen is required to register in one, and only one, permanent residential location (changzhu di). The hukou status for every citizen is dually classified by residential location and occupational status: the former division of rural or urban defines one’s socio-economic activity in a specified
locality, either in urban centres or in rural settlements, while the latter classification of agricultural or non-agricultural decides one’s socio-economic eligibility and different relationship with the state within the established framework, though such a classification is no longer closely related to one’s real occupation (Chan and Zhang 1999). Basically, urban and non-agricultural hukou holders refer to urbanites, while rural and agricultural hukou holders mean peasants, but not necessarily even during the planned economy period (Zhu 1999: 103). The hukou status for a newborn is acquired when being registered within one month after birth according to his or her mother’s status.
The basic unit of the registration is the household and everyone is registered with a household. There are two kinds of households: (1) the family household, in which many people are living together with a family relation, or a single-person family; and (2) the collective household, including those people who are living in work units, schools or public dormitories. There are some differences for the registration procedures between urbanites and peasants. In cities, each household has a hukou booklet including information on all family members, and the sub-district police station keeps a household registration book including all population under the sub- district jurisdiction. These two records should match each other. In rural areas, the registration procedure is much simpler. The rural collectives keep registration books, once the commune and brigade (Zhang 1988) and now the township administration and village committee (Zuo 1993), but individual households do not hold a hukou booklet. It was assumed when creating the registration system that peasants should and would be less mobile. The rural household registration only needs to record information for peasants of permanent residence and four items of demographic changes: births, deaths, out-migrations and in-migrations.
The registrations of the hukou system rely upon self-reporting from the head of each household, in particular the demographic changes within the household. Any changes should be reported promptly to the relevant hukou administrations, which will make necessary rectifications in their held registrations. The basic principle of the system is that each person must match his or her registered residential location. Therefore, in most cases, an urban and non-agricultural hukou holder is supposed to stay in a city, a rural and agricultural holder in a village. An official approval must be obtained in
advance for migration, which also changes one’s registration status. This principle that a person must match his or her registered residential location made the hukou system an effective source of population statistics by accurately tracking individual residence and mobility.
Many authors criticised the hukou system for imposing ‘invisible walls’ upon peasants to limit the rural-urban transformation (Chan 1994), but the registration system alone did not necessarily guarantee effective control of population mobility. It was the attachment of a series of socio-economic systems, such as the rural Commune system, and the urban rationing system for food and other daily necessities, that enabled the registration system to be an effective instrument to regulate population distribution and mobility (Cai 2000; Cheng and Selden 1994; Wang 1997). Since the early 1960s, all state-controlled resources and arrangements including free housing, employment opportunity and medical care, had been assigned to urbanites only based on their residential status, totally excluding rural hukou holders. Therefore, during the period from 1958 to 1978, the hukou system separated urbanites from peasants as if they were citizens in two different societies. In the absence of large numbers of migrants, both urbanites and peasants would be living in their due residence, and the registration system could easily track down the location and movement of anyone.
However, the power of the hukou system as a core socio-economic institution has been greatly weakened in the reform era, in the wake of rapid economic development and the subsequent rural-urban migration and urbanisation. From the late 1970s, the rural de-collectivisation reform not only improved production efficiency and household income, but also liberated peasants from the strict control under the Commune system. Meanwhile, the urban economic reconstruction and boom after 1978 attracted more and more rural surplus labour. Under these circumstances, in the early 1980s, the government both relaxed the strict quota-control of formal authorised migration, and modified the stipulation of peasants temporarily staying in the cities, responding to the changing reality, though still assuming they would go back to the villages.
It has been possible for rural-urban temporary migrants to live independently of the hukou system in cities since the mid-1980s, especially in the coastal developed provinces like Guangdong. Along with rapid socio-economic development, a series of socio-economic arrangements once attached to the hukou system were gradually separated from personal registration status during the 1990s, such as the food rationing system. The economic take-off in the 1990s further generated employment opportunities and resources available to temporary migrants. According to the 2000 census, by the year 2000, at least 10 million peasants, the rural hukou holders, were working in cities (SSB 2002b). The market-oriented reforms had already made the hukou system unnecessary for urbanites in most aspects, except in education and medical care. Thus, the hukou system was no longer considered essential in daily life for most Chinese people in the 1990s.