Hukou-Based Differentiation and the Longingfor a Good Future Life
A final mode of differentiation is hukou-based. For those who are familiar with China issues, this should come without surprise, as it is now established consensus that the hukou system has long played a limiting role shaping migrant workers’ working conditions and community life (e.g. Solinger, 1999; Xiang, 2004; Young, 2013). And it does so by creating de facto dual, hierarchical citizenship statuses within one country, with urban residents at the top and rural residents at the bottom, each entitled with different civil rights to work and live in urban areas and different access to social welfare and public service provisions. The distinction between urban and rural residents is sharp to the extent that scholars and commentators often compare the hukou system to the Apartheid system in South Africa and the caste system in India. At the beginning of the reform, under the hukou system, rural residents were secondary citizens who were denied legal rights to work and live in cities, but were required to get themselves a visa-like residential permit to do so, which cost around one month’s wage (Chan, 2001; Fan, 2008). They were further denied access to work-related protection, social welfare and public service provision in the city. This is reminiscent of Guy Standing’s characterization of immigrants in Europe as ‘denizens’ (Standing, 2014), and effectively created a dual labour market where rural-to-urban migrants were denied access to public sector jobs, while in private sectors, employers could take advantage of their denizen status to squeeze their labour at incredibly low rate and with despotic managerial practices (Peng, 2011; Wu, 2017). In other words, hukou as a mode of differentiation, because of the constraints it posed on migrants in terms of citizenship rights and entitlements, have long locked China’s migrant workers in extreme precarity, in situations similar to clandestine immigrants in Europe, despite that they were in their own land.
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