Migration Creates Urban Underclass

By Patricia Mohr@

Vast numbers of Chinese move from poor, rural areas to industrialized cities. The prospect of employment has attracted hundreds of millions of people to the crowded streets of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other cities with 13 million people joining the trend each year.

It’s a personal gamble in some ways for these rural migrants to relocate in big cities like Shanghai. The relative economic payoff is great. Big cities have jobs, and jobs bring money to spend and send home to parents, grandparents, wives and children. For these workers, the low pay is of little consequence. Compared to what they would make back home in the sparse west and central regions, city salaries pay well. But the fierce competition for job means the long, arduous voyage East comes with no guarantee.

What is certain is these migrants will face both formal and informal discrimination in their new homes, making it difficult or even impossible for them to fully integrate into the social structure of urban society.

Formal discrimination comes from China’s long-standing household registration system, called the “hukuo” policy. The hukuo policy of internal passports categorizes and organizes the population according location of origin. In effect, it creates a two-tiered socioeconomic status that divides lower-class rural citizens from higher-class urban residents.

Though the hukuo registration system has evolved since its start in the mid-1950s and no longer restricts movement, it still has the effect of immobilizing passage from a lower class to a higher class status. That is because the household registration system denies city services such as public education and medical care to migrant residents. Due to outcries for change from the lower classes, the policy has undergone some recent changes, including those that permit some children of migrant workers to attend grade schools and middle schools in Beijing. Nevertheless, it is still quite restrictive, and the lines between the urban and rural classes are still well defined.

In a way, the two-tier class system mirrors China’s own bifurcated economy, which could be classified as both developing and developed. Highly developed cities along the Eastern coast and East simply bear no resemblance to impoverished provinces in the west and central regions.

As for the people, the difference in the style, mannerism and ability between urban and rural classes is striking. What is obvious even to an outsider is that lower-class migrants living in the cities are routinely shunned by the more-polished urbanites. As I walked through the streets of Shanghai, I often noticed polished pedestrians snickering at poorly dressed people nearby.

While class-based condescension is common in all parts of the world, it is the hukuo registration policy that makes Chinese discrimination distinct. It not only validates the human instinct for prejudice, it engrains it within society from generation to generation.