The Chinese housing crunch

Twice a week, I venture off campus to teach English at Buhler Changzhou, the local branch of Buhler, a Swiss manufacturing company. I wrote an earlier post about it, if you are interested. I try to fill the classes with interesting subjects so that the discussions will go well, but also so that all of us can learn a little. Last class we talked about immigration, which went went very well. It was interesting to see the stark contrast of China (a country with almost no immigrants) to the U.S. a country where one out of every ten people is an immigrant. As a related subject, we discussed the 'hukou' system, which is the Chinese household registration system. I read the Wikipedia article about it and a few news articles about reforms to get some background information, but mainly wanted to learn from them.

The men in the class best described a 'hukou' as the right to reside. Essentially, a 'hukou' is issued to a person (normally to each family, and until 1998, was only issued patriarchally. They said it exists because it existed in the past. It existed in the past as a way to control the population under the various Chinese empires. As we all know, control of the citizenry is pretty important in feudalism. They were able to share a lot with me, most of them having similar opinions, but all of them pretty strong. The first main argument that I received promoting the system was that if the government needs to control the population, the system allows them to do it easily for any portion. The second argument was that it "can control diseases more easily"
and that it "controlled SARS very quickly." Most of them seemed to think that the system was unfair and outdated, and wanted it to be changed. Initially, it was used so that people in the rural areas could not move to the cities, and vice versa. They said with a "city hukou you can get a good job and a high salary." As they explained very clearly, more important than the inability to move out of your city or county (without significant government approval), is that the hukou grants the citizens the right to government services, like education and healthcare.

There have been plenty of changes to the hukou system within modern China's short history. Initially, it was used as they said "to control the population" or rather keep rural people rural and urban people urban. There are lots of comparisons to an 'economic apartheid' used to maintain a large supply of cheap labor for the state run companies of communist China. Now, though, via reforms, mobility is much more prevalent. There are three ways to change one's hukou, as they explained. The first is by getting into a college in another place. You are given a temporary hukou as long as you live there. The second way is to buy a house; "if you buy a house, you can get the hukou." The third, and most common way (for the people at Buhler at least) is to have a company sponsor the hukou for you. Living at company provided apartments or dormitories is common, and this is considered 'buying' a house within the modern hukou system. Thus gainful employment by a company with the ability to house you allows for most college graduates to gain a hukou for wherever they are employed. The 'students' in my class told me that these sort of companies are not giving hukous to all the factory workers or maids. This is a key point, these work issued hukous only apply to the upper echelon of workers. Instead it is designed for the educated to be able to spread across China to where they are most needed for development. Many students from poorer areas, though, are required to return home after graduation to help the underdeveloped areas catch up to China's booming coast. This is done through a scholarship/admission standard differences/hukou transfer forbiddance combination of contracted requirements. All in all, the fact is that you must be in college, college educated, or rich enough to purchase your own home in order to move in China. These reforms still cause a housing 'crunch' for a huge group of people. Migrant workers in China, if considered their own country, would be the seventh or eighth most populated in the world, bigger than Russia or Japan. In my opinion, they are the real sufferers of the hukou system, living as second class citizens while they contribute greatly to the growth of this country. The pics in this blog are of the workers' residences who are building the new library on campus. As one of the men in my class said about the restriction on moving within one's own country "I think it's ridiculous." My last comment will be how strikingly similar the migrant workers due to the hukou system in China are to the illegal immigrants in the United States due to our immigration policies.