Population Governance in China: An Analysis from the Household Registration System (Hukou) Perspective

Abstract

China’s population governance apparatus includes a system of household registration referred to as “hukou” that collects detailed data on individuals and their families. This information includes people’s birthplace, ancestral origin, ID number, religious affiliation, military service status, blood type, height, place of residence, address changes, among other attributes. The state bureaucracy relies on hukou to classify households and individuals legally, socially, and geographically, as well as regulate their rights and duties. It also uses hukou to order family relationships and influence people’s marriage decisions, geographic mobility, real estate investment, among other aspects of life. While state actors use hukou information for policymaking and policing, extra-state actors use hukou to sort people’s social standing and navigate interactions in daily life. Using Michel Foucault’s and Max Weber’s scholarship on power, this study analyzes the hukou reforms, which are ongoing since the late 1970s. My analysis demonstrates that today’s hukou is markedly different from that of the Mao era. At that time, hukou endured primarily as a coercive institutional mechanism that divided China’s population into “agricultural” and “non-agricultural” families for welfare distribution and imposed upon the people state-made choices that guided nearly all aspects of their lives. In contrast, today’s hukou also includes a liberal facet. I argue that the hukou reforms are gradually transforming hukou into a “technology of governance” that is conducive to individual autonomy, personal choice, and private interest, providing people with more freedom in guiding their lives. Nonetheless, local governments still use hukou to regulate people’s lives, but they do so indirectly. They use policies relating to hukou status to condition people’s choices around marriage, migration, real estate investment, and even behavior on the Internet. Together, such policies construct an environment of opportunities and constraints that guide people’s actions invisibly and under the auspices of “free choice.” In this environment, the role of the state in guiding people’s life becomes invisible, hidden behind a sense of individual autonomy, and thus shielded from view. Hukou’s transformation indicates the emergence of a more liberal practice of population governance in China that relies on hukou data collection (i.e., surveillance) to manufacture social conformity based on voluntary compliance, as opposed to government coercion. My analysis results from extensive fieldwork in Jinan (9 months between 2015 and 2016), the capital city of Shandong Province, China. My research data consists of 250 interviews with a diverse profile of Jinan residents, ethnographic observations, and documentary information. My thesis demonstrates that hukou plays a vital role in creating citizens that comply with a private logic of capital accumulation, and which thrives in an environment that demands individual autonomy, personal initiative, competitiveness, productivity, decision-making skills, and risk management knowledge. It also calls into question viewpoints that portray China’s population governance strategies exclusively as coercive and authoritarian. Lastly, it supplements contemporary understandings of the hukou system through a new lens that focuses on its capacity to form liberal subjects, moving the hukou system beyond its traditional focus of analysis, which addresses its role in producing socioeconomic inequalities in China.