http://faculty.washington.edu/kwchan/Chan-WSB-Hukou-Abolition-CQ2008.pdf
Household registration in mainland China
The Communist Party instigated a command economy when it came to power in 1949. In 1958, the Chinese government officially promulgated the family register system to control the movement of people between urban and rural areas. Individuals were broadly categorised as a "rural" or "urban" worker.[4] A worker seeking to move from the country to urban areas to take up non-agricultural work would have to apply through the relevant bureaucracies. The number of workers allowed to make such moves was tightly controlled. Migrant workers would require six passes to work in provinces other than their own.[5] People who worked outside their authorized domain or geographical area would not qualify for grain rations, employer-provided housing, or health care.[6] There were controls over education, employment, marriage and so on.[4]Analogies to apartheid
The hukou system has been described as "China's apartheid".[18][19] The gradual relaxation of some of the more repressive aspects of the hukou system since the mid-1990s has largely eliminated the spatial aspect of the "apartheid". However, as the hukou remains partially hereditary, the "substance of the social apartheid remains intact."[20]Two areas differ from South Africa's apartheid system: Firstly, under a system called xia fang, or "sending down", individuals or groups of urban workers were sometimes re-classified as rural workers and banished to the countryside (at lower wages and benefits), often as a sentence for "bourgeois imperialist crimes" during the Cultural Revolution; by contrast, white workers in South Africa were never sent to work in Bantustans. Second, the ideology driving China's apartheid system was Maoism, not racism.[14] More significantly it is possible to move up from a rural to an urban hukou by obtaining a college degree and gaining employment with a corporation or the government.
Some Mainland Chinese-based scholars claim that though the Hukou system is discriminatory, it is no worse than the passport system keeping people from developing countries from resettling in the West,[9].
No comments:
Post a Comment