The household registration (hukou) system has been widely recognized as a key contributory factor to social inequality and tensions in China yet it remains intact despite a series of institutional reforms. What explains the resilience of the system? In this study, we address this puzzle by drawing on policy documents, statistical data and interviews. We argue that the hukou system remains because it is used to protect the beneficiaries of welfare provision and to ensure pivotal groups continue to offer political support. We find that owing to the reforms, a formidable barrier has been erected between the guarded cities and other regions to protect healthcare and education resources from inbound migrant workers. Consequently, the institutional reforms of the hukou system serve as a political contrivance for the survival of the Chinese party-state regime. The findings contribute to emerging literature on China's political control by elaborating political elites’ subtle tactics through various institutions at central and local levels. We expect the new “Great Wall” established under Xi's administration to be an even stronger barrier than before for migrants during the current pandemic and in the future.

Approximately 13 million Chinese lack hukou, the formal household registration. This prevents them from claiming full citizenship rights, including social welfare, formal identity documents and employment in the state sector. The government blames birth planning policies for the unregistered population, but this explanation ignores the role of internal migration. Because citizenship rights are locally determined and the hukou system is locally managed, migrants face significant barriers to registering their children. This article systematically analyses the political determinants of the unregistered population nationwide. Based on a logit analysis of a sample of 2.5 million children from the 2000 census, I find that children born in violation of the one-child policy do have lower rates of registration and that children born to migrant mothers are four times more likely to be unregistered than registered. Continuing government focus on the effect of birth planning ignores the more fundamental institutional barriers inherent in the hukou system.

Scholars studying Chinese development have long acknowledged the significance of the hukou system in impeding internal migration and defining welfare entitlements. However, another crucial barrier is often overlooked: the incomplete transferability of acquired welfare rights. By examining the case of the Urban Employee Basic Pension System, this paper aims to understand how the limited transferability of acquired rights acts as an obstacle to labour migration and entitlement accomplishment. It also seeks to explore the factors that are accountable for the low level of welfare rights transferability. Our findings suggest that migration and entitlement barriers today may not be so much a question of a particular form of hukou exclusion but more of a problem of insufficient rights portability. An in-depth understanding of the structural constraints of China's reform-era migration and rights attainment needs to take into account the transferability of welfare entitlements for migrant workers, and go beyond a narrow conceptualization of the hukou system per se.

The demise of collective units that attach citizens to the state in China has been overstated; the hegemonic form of Chinese citizenship today links participation and welfare entitlement to membership in a collective unit in a specific locality. This article presents an ethnographic account of the operation of this “normal” form of local citizenship in resident and villager committees in Tianjin. These committees combine participatory and welfare dimensions of citizenship in one institutional setting. Here, citizens are bound to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making, a mode of rule I term “socialized governance,” which blurs the boundaries between political compliance and social conformity, and makes social norms a strong force in the citizenship order. While variably achieved in practice, this form of citizenship represents an ideal that shapes conditions for politics and perceptions of inequality.