Hukou and land: market reform and rural displacement in China

Abstract

Scholarship about the Chinese hukou (household registration) system has focused on the advantages and entitlements associated with urban hukou. This paper shifts attention to the key entitlement provided by rural hukou – village land. While early hukou reforms were mainly designed to open up urban labor markets to rural migrants, recent reforms have also begun to open up rural land markets, by replacing hukou-based land rights with market-based rights. These reforms are designed to facilitate land concentration and the transfer of land to outside developers and agribusiness companies, which has been hindered by hukou-based land rights. Underlying the reforms is the government's agenda of promoting large-scale agriculture and urbanization, both of which require the removal of a large portion of the rural population from the land. By focusing on land rights rather than urban benefits, this paper provides a new perspective on the evolution of the hukou system, and highlights the negative implications of recent reforms for livelihood security in the countryside.

Keywords:

• China
• household registration
• land rights
• marketization
• urbanization
• agricultural industrialization

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Michael Levien, Bill Martin, Dorothy Solinger, Eli Friedman, Lei Guang, participants in the Program on Global Social Change Seminar at Johns Hopkins University, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹For convenience, we use the terms rural hukou and agricultural hukou interchangeably. A small proportion of village residents, such as teachers and retired urban workers, hold non-agricultural hukou.

²An exception is Han (1999), who emphasized the link between hukou and rural land rights.

³An exception is Zhu (2007), who emphasized that the key reason many migrant workers are reluctant to convert from rural to urban hukou is to hold on to their land rights. Chan and Buckingham (2008), in their detailed discussion about the elimination of the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural hukou, mention rural land in an aside, but focus on the implications for urban entitlements.

⁴The Tang version of the Equal Fields system is described in Holcombe (2001, 133–37), Twitchett (1970), Wan (1972), Wang (2005, 33–45) and Xiong (1999). Schurmann (1968, 405–08, 558, 571) focuses on the military origins of the system in the Northern Wei Dynasty (386–584 AD).

⁵Qiao was quoted in Shen (2013).

⁶For the last 12 years, the CCP Central Committee and the State Council have devoted their annual Number 1 Document to agrarian development policies, increasingly promoting the scaling up of agriculture.

⁷In 11 out of the last 12 years, the CCP Central Committee's annual Number 1 Document has specifically promoted dragonhead companies.

⁸Aohan County Government (2011). Other scholars have also shown that GDP growth is an important goal of attracting agribusiness companies. See, for example, Li (2013); Zhu (2004).

⁹The kinds of cooperation between local officials and agribusiness companies described in this section have also been documented by a number of other scholars; see Wang (2008); Yin, Guo and Mi (2003); Yu (2005); Zhang and Donaldson (2008); Zhang (2012); Zhang (2015).

¹⁰It should be noted that Landesa's research is shaped by a strong policy agenda that favors land privatization.

¹¹CCP Central Committee and the State Council .(2014a, 2014b); Gu (2015); Guangdong Provincial People's Government Finance Office (2015); Naughton (2015); Xu, Zhu, and Liu (2014); Yi (2013); Zhou (2014). Pilot mortgage regulations allow for lenders, in case of default, to take over land management rights and income derived from leasing these rights until the loan balance has been paid off (see, for instance, Binzhou City People's Government 2015).

¹²Li quoted in Roberts 2013.

¹³These numbers are compiled from media reports.

¹⁴Sargeson's calculation (2013, 1068) is based on the amount of rural land converted to urban use, using the widely reported figure of 4.2 million hectares. For other estimates, see Li (2011) and Zhang (2013).

¹⁵For ethnographic accounts, see Chuang (2014), Johnson (2013) and Ong (2014).

¹⁶The survey was conducted by the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China. This finding was corroborated by a 2012 national survey conducted by Tsinghua University's China Data Center, which reported that two thirds of rural migrants were unwilling to give up their agricultural hukou (Zhongguo qingnian bao 2014). Also see Zhu (2007).

¹⁷An alternative mode of urban expansion, implemented in parts of Guangdong Province, has allowed villages to retain collective ownership of urbanized land, a practice that has been lucrative for village members (Chung and Unger 2013; Hsing 2010, 122–51). Despite support among some Chinese scholars and officials (see, for instance, Dang 2008; Zhang 2007), it is clear that Chinese leaders have no intention of following this path.

¹⁸See Zhou (2013, 361). Quantifying these trends is difficult because definitions of formal and informal employment vary, and employment statistics are problematic; these estimates, therefore, should not be considered precise, but they give an idea of the magnitude of the change.

¹⁹See, for instance, Cai 2010.

²⁰These figures, based on 2009 Rural Household Survey data published by China's National Bureau of Statistics, use a broad definition of migrant labor – working outside of one's home township for over one month in a year. Also see Meng (2012, 2013).

²¹This consequence has been stressed by He (2003), Li (2008) and Wen (2009).

²²For an incisive discussion of the global growth of shantytowns, see Davis (2006). While rural migrants in many cities in the developing world build their own shantytowns in a haphazard fashion, in China the state continues to take charge of building apartment blocks for most of the displaced rural households. These housing projects on the urban periphery, however, increasingly share the key characteristics of shantytowns in the Global South: few jobs and shabby construction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel Andreas

Joel Andreas, an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, studies political contention and social change in contemporary China. His book, Rise of the red engineers: the Cultural Revolution and the origins of China's new class (Stanford, 2009), analyzes the contentious process through which old and new elites coalesced during the decades following the 1949 Communist Revolution. He is currently investigating changing labor relations in Chinese factories between 1949 and the present, as well as recent changes in agrarian society.

Shaohua Zhan

Shaohua Zhan is an assistant professor of sociology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research involves historical and contemporary rural development in China, labor migration, the hukou system, land rights and food security. His recent publications have re-examined the roles of land, community and market in the remarkable rise of the Chinese rural industry, and documented how ongoing land expropriation has undermined the legacy of rural industrialization and exerted a negative impact on ordinary people's livelihoods.