Living on the Edge: Household Registration Reform and Peri-Urban Precarity in China

ABSTRACT:

China’s household registration system divides the nation into urban and rural populations, conditioning life chances and producing widespread inequity. Recent reform experiments in Chongqing have met with mixed success, as many residents have declined to convert to urban registration. This article ethnographically investigates the rationales and strategies of residents in Hailong, a village in Chongqing where residents were reluctant to participate in household registration reform. For Hailong residents, the state-sponsored welfare offered through urban registration was perceived as a source of exploitation and precarity. In search of stability, Hailong residents developed informal welfare strategies, including mutual support networks and economic diversification. By forcing residents to give up their land rights and adopt urban roles, household registration reform threatened these informal strategies. The article concludes by exploring the policy implications of this analysis, including the possibility of developing formal welfare programs that complement—rather than replace—informal strategies.

A neighborhood in Hailong Village, China where agricultural, residential, and industrial uses intermingle (2012)

Notes

Earlier experiments in household registration reform have also encountered low participation rates (Zhu, ).

A similar approach is taken by Anna Lora-Wainwright in her recent exploration of rural residents’ apparently irrational healthcare decisions (2011). As Lora-Wainwright explains, such decision making cannot be understood purely as a function of cost. Rather, it is necessary to ethnographically explore the relationships in which residents are embedded in order to understand their perceptions of healthcare efficacy.

Research was conducted in January 2010, June 2011–August 2012, and June–July 2013 and supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE1144152), the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (8331), the Whitney and Desmond Shum Fellowship, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

All names have been changed to protect residents’ anonymity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nick R. Smith

Nick R. Smith is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University. Using a combination of ethnography and spatial analysis, his research explores urban transformation, planning, and policy in rapidly developing contexts. Smith’s recent work has investigated the construction of the urban–rural dichotomy in China and its effects on community development in peri-urban villages.