Introduction Excerpt for Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship
Introduction
Moving from one place to another is a common experience. Although moving across towns or states creates exciting prospects for new jobs and new lifestyles, bureaucratic headaches can result: establishing a new address and proof of residency, the dreaded visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles to change driver’s license, registering children in new school districts, and more. But routine internal migration found in many parts of the world operates differently in China. A person moving from Shanghai to Beijing, for example, is building a new life but faces additional barriers more usually associated with international migration than with internal migration. Chinese internal migrants can rent an apartment, but in most places, they cannot automatically register their children in their neighborhood school. They can establish utilities for their home, but they cannot directly sign up for the same health insurance, unemployment benefits, or minimum livelihood guarantees offered to the locals they now live among. In short, China’s 376 million internal migrants lack local citizenship—entitlements to local-government-provided rights—because they do not have official local urban household registration.1
Internal, domestic migrants in China are a distinct population legally separated from their local neighbors via the household registration, or hukou, system. The Chinese hukou is an internal citizenship institution: an exclusive, hereditary identity document that predicates rights entitlements in one subnational location. Local citizens, those with locally registered hukou, are entitled to services and redistribution provided by the local government, whereas internal migrants who live and work outside their place of registration are not. This internal citizenship distinguishes China from many contexts in which national citizenship creates equal membership in the state internally. The only way for internal migrants to gain permanent access to government services is to formally relinquish their previous hukou and its entitlements to register in a new location. But in contrast to the experience of moving between cities or provinces in other countries, obtaining a new hukou requires not just notifying but obtaining approval from the local government. Local governments, with control over who has access to local services, became particular about who and how many migrants they allowed to gain local citizenship in the early twenty-first century. As a result, how restrictive or permissive municipalities are when it comes to allowing migrants to gain hukou and thus access local-government services varies significantly. Some created open policies, allowing more migrants to naturalize locally—formally transferring their hukou to local urban status and canceling their old hukou—whereas others remained closed, making it nearly impossible for migrant workers to gain permanent access to local citizenship rights.
To illustrate, take the examples of Xi’an and Chengdu, two provincial capitals in China. In Xi’an, local officials targeted high-skilled workers from other provinces to whom to grant hukou. In 2010, the city’s official hukou population grew by 5,900 net migrants, approximately 0.07 percent of the total population (Shaanxi Statistics Bureau 2011). Chengdu, just southwest of Xi’an, had looser regulations on who was eligible to change hukou and targeted local migrants, those who had long ago arrived in the city from the local countryside but had been living as outsiders, to give local citizenship through hukou. In 2010, Chengdu’s hukou population grew by 96,196 net migrants, or 0.8 percent of the total population (Sichuan Statistics Bureau 2011). Across the country, municipalities varied in which migrants could become local citizens and in how many could gain hukou and thus entitlements to local citizenship rights (figure 0.1).
Why do some local governments open their doors and actively integrate migrants into the local citizenry while others remain closed? Why are some migrants welcomed in one city and not the next? What explains variation in access to local citizenship within China?
This book argues that access to citizenship rights, and therefore, access to government redistribution, results from both security and economic motivations. Specifically, officials at multiple levels of the Chinese bureaucracy faced a trade-off between security-driven incentives to exclude migrants and economically-driven incentives to include migrants to support development. On the one hand, the need to provide public security and social stability created incentives to remain restrictive, protecting local resources from outsiders—that is, limiting autocratic redistribution. On the other hand, economic development imperatives created countervailing pressures to operate open citizenship regimes to manage local labor markets.
FIGURE 0.1. Estimated net hukou acquisition rate of migrants in mainland China in 2010. Source: Estimated using MPS (2010) and NBS (2010). Naturalized population size is estimated as growth of local urban population not attributed to natural growth. Internal citizenship regimes vary across the country because local economic development strategies differ in ways that change who the local state wants to incorporate into the permanent population. Outward-oriented development—driven by engagement with the international economy—increases incentives for high-skilled labor recruitment through migration. Bottom-up development—driven by local resources and agricultural upgrading—increases the need to integrate more local, rural populations to support transformation of the old urban-rural dual management economy. Top-down policies—in which development depends on central-government support—encourage expansion of citizenship to meet central policy targets. Internal citizenship regimes are, then, the downstream result of security concerns and variation in development policies at multiple levels of government.
This balancing act between security-based conservatism and development-supporting liberalization created a highly institutionalized form of authoritarian citizenship. Without democratic institutions creating broad accountability mechanisms, autocratic systems can—and do—limit redistribution. They do so substantively, by redistributing socioeconomic rights rather than political rights, and mechanically, by redistributing to those whose inclusion benefits the state. Internal citizenship institutions—rules governing who is entitled to redistributed rights within one national polity—allow autocratic systems to ensure both security and economic incentives behind redistribution. These internal citizenship regimes subdivide the population into different classifications of citizens with differentiated rights entitlements. Only full citizens are entitled to the most socioeconomic rights. The result is a form of autocratic citizenship defined by particularistic membership that predicates socioeconomic rights.
Who, in the end, gains access to citizenship also depends on migrants themselves. Policy reforms of the early twenty-first century create institutional space for voluntarism, in which migrants can choose to change their hukou or not, analogous to an international naturalization decision. No longer subjects of central and local policies dictating one’s identity, individuals choose to naturalize and access local citizenship or remain outsiders. This individual-level decision-making about hukou identity increasingly determines overall variation in access to citizenship rights after hukou reform, because some migrants choose not to naturalize and become local even when given the opportunity to do so by liberalizing local governments.
Unequal Redistribution and Autocratic Citizenship
Autocratic states rely on redistribution to stay in power. Often framed as the authoritarian bargain, autocratic systems exchange socioeconomic rights and redistribution for at least tacit political support. A state that does not provide redistribution may face threats to its power because even autocratic systems rely on popular support (Przeworski 2022). But redistribution is inherently unequal because political power is unevenly distributed in society. Political supporters receive the most redistribution (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Haber 2006), and political challengers receive redistribution to buy their support or ingratiate the regime with them (Albertus, Fenner, and Slater 2018; Gandhi 2008; Haggard and Kaufman 2009; Knutsen and Rasmussen 2017; Pan 2020). But extant theories fail to explain who counts as a member of the selectorate—the privileged group of those who receive at least some redistribution—and how autocratic leaders use institutions to define and change hierarchies of inclusion. As a result, theories of authoritarian redistribution focus on the security imperative—redistribution as a coercion, co-optation, and repression mechanism—overlooking concurrent economic incentives and how redistribution incentives vary within one polity. The arguments laid out in this book use citizenship institutions to fill these gaps.
Citizenship institutions constitute not only rights but also an exclusive membership identity—formal belonging in the polity with rights entitlements from the state (Brubaker 1992; Tilly 1995). Traditionally, citizenship conjures up the image of national-level membership: we are citizens of China, the United States, or South Africa. But when institutions divide a population within one polity, allowing access to citizenship rights to some nationals but not others, citizenship must be relocated below the national level. These internal citizenship regimes—institutions that define membership in citizenship within a national polity—create hierarchies of belonging within one country and are a core feature of citizenship in authoritarian contexts.
One of this book’s most important contributions is a framework for understanding citizenship in authoritarian contexts. Other studies of citizenship focus on direct political rights, often equating democracy and citizenship (Distelhorst and Fu 2019).2 From the perspective that elections make citizens, in which the concept of citizenship applies only if there are direct political elections, nondemocratic nationals are relegated to subjecthood and individuals are merely subject to imperial power without rights entitlements.3 This assumption of subjecthood mischaracterizes the nature of individual-state relations for more than half the world’s population.4 By limiting the study of citizenship to cases with direct political participation, the study of individual-state relations ignores other forms of what Tilly (1995) calls transactions between people and the state—the fundamental basis of citizenship.
Citizenship in authoritarian contexts has not gone unstudied, but existing research emphasizes the application of democratic definitions of citizenship in authoritarian contexts and individual-level rights claiming. Some scholars use existing, democracy-focused conceptions of citizenship to identify patterns of democratic practices in authoritarian contexts.5 Other scholars focus on citizens themselves: citizenship is not only the institutions that bestow rights but also the individual identity and the practice of claiming rights from the state.6 The arguments presented here contribute to the systemic understanding of citizenship in authoritarian settings, of membership in the polity that predicates rights and responsibilities—the fundamental institutions that define citizenship. Autocratic systems design citizenship institutions, particularly citizenship membership rules defining who is and is not entitled to state resources, to manage and manipulate populations and redistribution.7
VARIETIES OF CITIZENSHIP
Fundamentally, citizenship is a special membership category: an identity that bestows on its holders rights and responsibilities determined by belonging to a particular political community (Brubaker 1992; Turner 1990, 1993). It is an exclusionary status of entitlement that connects the individual and state through a series of transactions (Brubaker 1992; Soysal 1994; Tilly 1995). The most important and fundamental purpose of citizenship is to delineate membership that entitles some individuals—citizens—to allocation of resources provided by the state while excluding others—noncitizens (Brubaker 1992; Turner 1993). Membership institutions are the rules and structures that dictate who is entitled to citizenship rights. Citizenship membership creates boundaries defining citizenship as a special class.8 Defining citizenship by entitlements—what members are entitled to from the state defining citizenship rights—and exclusion—who is and is not entitled to these benefits defined by membership institutions—is not inherently related to regime type and provides a rubric for comparing types of citizenship across different political regimes.
In its ideal democratic form, citizenship is a universal, inclusive membership that bestows democratically defined individual rights, epitomized by electoral rights that distribute political power across society. Universal membership in citizenship is a necessary condition for a functioning ideal-type democracy in which individuals have power over the state through political participation (Dahl 2005).
But the democratic citizenship of civil, political, and social rights envisioned by Marshall (1950) and others who followed is just one form of citizenship rarely fully realized. In practice, most democracies do not ensure full, ideal-type inclusive democratic citizenship because “democratic norms are not perfectly realized anywhere” (Schedler 2002, 38, emphasis in original). Citizenship rights and membership are truncated, interrupted, and selectively protected (Chung 2017; Lohr 2012; Starr 2021). The fundamental rights of political participation in democracies are regularly restricted. Throughout history and across country contexts, laws and policies reduce the ability of women and racial and religious groups to vote, stripping them of the most important democratic political right (Keyssar 2009). Strict voter registration laws in the United States during the twentieth century, for example, interrupt the practice of citizenship by imposing high administrative burdens (Highton 2004). When equitable democratic rights clash with traditionalist cultural values, women’s rights are often restricted.9 Informal institutions such as corruption and clientelism prevent the full realization of political rights. For example, clientelist regimes in Colombia combined with economic precarity characteristic of unprotected social citizenship leads to vote buying, undermining representative democracy (Escobar 2002).
Even when political rights are well established, access to social rights depends on a group’s ability to lobby. Social rights and economic protections in one-person, one-vote systems mean some groups gain socioeconomic rights and redistribution from the government when they represent strong political groups. When interest groups lose the ability to influence elections, they lose the ability to ensure social citizenship outlays.10 Formal democratic institutions also channel discriminatory practices that limit social citizenship. For example, in the United States, de jure discrimination in segregation policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries formally stripped political and social citizenship rights from people of color. Even after school integration, legal segregationist housing policies prevented people of color from enjoying the benefits of urban spaces with higher quality of social rights, such as education (Rothstein 2017), creating a de facto limitation on membership in social citizenship.
The highly varied experience of citizenship in democracies and general lacunae in theories of citizenship in nondemocracies highlight the need to expand the study of citizenship beyond its ideal and dominant forms. Developing a better understanding of how citizenship institutions operate beyond ideal-type democracies creates a more inclusive concept with global application.
THEORIZING AUTHORITARIAN CITIZENSHIP
Non-democratic Rights and Membership
Unlike its democratic counterpart, citizenship in authoritarian contexts is premised on unequal entitlements to rights. Both defining features of citizenship—rights and membership—exist in nondemocracies, but their content varies: socioeconomic group-based rights dominate and membership is particularistic rather than universal.
Unwilling to redistribute political rights, autocrats redistribute socioeconomic rights as citizenship rights (Mann 1987; Meijer and Butenschøn 2017b; Perry 2008). Many authoritarian systems, China included, premise state legitimacy on the provision of economic well-being, income growth, and the provision of some basic welfare such as education and pensions (Hu and Saich 2012; Keane 2002; Perry 2008; Shi and Lu 2010; Solinger 1999). Although political rights do exist, such as voting in local elections, socioeconomic redistribution defines the individual-state relationship.
Citizenship rights describe what individuals are entitled to from the state; membership defines who is entitled to those rights. Unlike universal membership in ideal-type democracies, membership in nondemocratic citizenship is inherently particularistic, creating boundaries of belonging within a national polity in which some have access to citizenship rights and others do not. Autocratic systems are not rooted in universalistic expectations of the state-individual relationship. Instead, autocratic systems can, and do, create internal citizenship regimes that subdivide the national political community into members and nonmembers.
Internal citizenship regimes are sets of membership policies used to divide populations within a country dictating people’s eligibility for citizenship rights.11 Some individuals are marked as members in the policy, having entitlements to rights provisions, and some are nonmembers, restricted from accessing rights. Internal citizenship regimes can divide the population along economic,12 racial,13 religious,14 and geographic lines. These regimes create hierarchies of citizenship with differentiated membership statuses within one national context that consequently dictate who has access to citizenship rights and who does not. This disaggregation allows autocratic leaders to target different redistribution provision to specific groups, helpful for fulfilling the authoritarian bargain without providing more than necessary. The resulting institutional arrangements are fragmented, layered, and subject to manipulation by autocrats to strategically redistribute enough while limiting the provision of rights.
Hukou as a Citizenship Membership Institution
The hukou is the paramount internal citizenship institution in China on which access to rights provided by the local state depends. All individuals have a hukou that identifies each as a citizen of a particular location and with a particular type, either urban or rural. All are citizens of the specific county where they are registered, and the local government is responsible for providing access to citizenship rights. Most conventional elements of citizenship entitlements, such as public schools, state-run health insurance, and registration of children to establish their citizenship, are reserved for the local population, identified through hukou (Vortherms 2015, 2019; Zhang 2012). Only those holding a local hukou are permanently entitled to these rights (Chan 2009; Cheng and Selden 1994; Vortherms 2015). Non-hukou populations—those with hukou registered in some other city or county—do not have permanent access to locally provided social housing, social security, unemployment compensation, minimum livelihood guarantees, employment training, and small-enterprise subsidies where they live and work (Zhang 2012; Zhang and Wang 2010).15
Right to a particular hukou follows jus sanguinis lines: hukou is registered at birth and hukou identity is hereditary; children inherit their status from either one of their parents.16 Unequal citizenships are not only defined at birth but also carry on generationally, and children receive the same privileged or nonprivileged status as their parents, regardless of where they are born or what their parents do. Because of this birthright citizenship, there are no automatic ways to change hukou status. Instead, to obtain local citizenship in another location, a person must naturalize locally by applying for formal permission from the local government to change hukou and permanently relinquishing a previous hukou identity.17 Naturalization is the process of acquiring citizenship rights. I use the term local naturalization to refer to the processes whereby individuals gain citizenship status within internal citizenship regimes. Local naturalization processes are the rules that dictate the manner of selection of individuals to gain rights entitlements. Just like the what and who of authoritarian redistribution, naturalization policies are essential tools for manipulating how a person gains access to redistribution.
The Chinese hukou system operates similarly to other infamous internal passport systems, such as the Soviet propiska and its Central Asian descendants and the Vietnamese ho khau. In each of these settings, entitlements to government services, socioeconomic rights, and in extreme cases, livelihoods depend on holding local citizenship.
Varying Access to Local Citizenship
For decades, the central government strictly controlled local naturalizations, limiting who and how many people could change their hukou status, as a legacy of central economic planning. Even in the early reform years, the hukou remained integral to the dual urban-rural system of economic management.18 Decentralizing reforms in the first years of the twenty-first century attempted to break down the persistent urban-rural divides in the economy. As local governments gained greater autonomy, naturalization policies proliferated and diversified. Especially at the municipal level,19 governments manipulated local citizenship regimes, changing who was eligible for full citizenship and how many people could naturalize locally. Some municipalities targeted classically defined desirable migrants, including high-skilled workers and those with formal professional training. Others remained restrictive toward high-skilled workers and instead targeted more local migrants with family connections to the local urban center. Small cities, which often saw the strongest pressure from the central government to open naturalization pathways, varied greatly in hukou policies; some opened doors and others resisted reform and remained closed. The result was a highly varied landscape of access to citizenship rights across the country, and hundreds of millions of migrant workers faced dramatically different access to local citizenship rights. What explains variation in access to citizenship?
Some argue that the hukou is used to control the population, ensuring the regime’s security and stability.20 Traditionally, redistribution in authoritarian systems follows security threats, and socioeconomic goods are used to coerce, co-opt, or repress potential challengers to the regime.21 Migrant workers isolated by the hukou system in China lead many of the labor protests seen across the country because they often face significant discrimination and exploitative working conditions. In a system with socialist goals, such labor-based protests could be destabilizing, especially if protestors emphasize workers’ rights consciousness. This security pressure to avoid protests could filter down to local governments and encourage the use of hukou policies to protect security.
But since the first years of the twenty-first century, the hukou system has seen significant subnational variation and reform that cannot be explained by security alone. Of the two cities, Xi’an and Chengdu, mentioned earlier in the chapter, Chengdu faces higher security concerns than Xi’an yet naturalizes ten times, proportionally, as many migrants.22 Labor protests may fail to challenge the regime if they are rules oriented rather than rights oriented.23 And inequality, once presumed an existential threat to regime stability, finds mixed results in survey research (Whyte 2010, 2016). The security imperative of limiting and controlling the population no doubt encourages the continuation of the hukou system in some form but cannot explain variation alone.
Others have argued that access to citizenship rights resulted from marketization of hukou and the success of neoliberal economic models transforming the system. According to this perspective, as the country introduced market forces, hukou itself became a pseudo good, exposed to market supply and demand.24 Although the introduction of market forces increased incentives to reform the hukou system, especially reducing migration controls, market forces cannot explain why some cities remain fairly closed to some of the most economically productive migrants or why some smaller cities, with relatively weak market economies, see an expansion of citizenship rights but others do not. A purely market-based understanding of hukou ignores the active role state policy makers take in manipulating policy to benefit local development and the continuity of hukou as a state-directed form of development.
The Argument: Explaining Internal Citizenship Regimes and Their Outcomes
I argue that both security and economic logics drive variation in local citizenship membership, defining who can become a local citizen and who cannot. The central government long used the hukou system to protect government resources, by restricting access to services, and to promote economic development, by managing and distributing labor in either urban or rural economies. These forces encouraged exclusive membership and restrictive access to redistributive citizenship rights, especially in economically productive urban spaces. But as economic policy changed with the dismantling of the command economy, development policies encouraged greater openness in internal citizenship membership: granting more people access to citizenship rights in the pursuit of economic development. The central government reformed hukou management, decentralizing authority to local governments alongside control over other factors of production to match the shift toward a decentralized and adaptive economic development model. Local governments, in turn, used local citizenship regimes to target migrants for integration through naturalization when they benefited local development policies.
Variation in internal citizenship regimes, and therefore access to particularistic, expanded access to citizenship rights, resulted from balancing exclusion, driven by security concerns, and openness, driven by economic incentives, at both central and local policy-making levels. Security, prioritized by the central government, supported the hukou system’s continuation. But economic motivations for supporting development drove institutional change and greater openness. Central policies continued to emphasize maintaining the system while allowing bottom-up variation in hukou policy management. Local variation proliferated with new ways internal migrants could gain local citizenship and differing barriers for groups among municipalities, changing who could naturalize. A migrant with desirable characteristics, such as educational background or wealth, might be welcomed in one city but not in the next.
Granting of hukou and expanding access to citizenship redistribution continued as a primary tool for managing labor in China’s market socialist system. When control over economic development policies decentralized, so too did hukou policies so that labor market management could match local development needs. Local governments, through their control over membership policies—the rules of who was and could become a local citizen—used these internal citizenship regimes to strategically manipulate their population to align with local development strategies: migrants whose skills supported local development could naturalize, and everyone else remained excluded.
Variation in access to citizenship resulted from divergent development strategies because strategies were not monolithic across the country. I present three broad categories of development strategies that target different types of migrants for inclusion: Outward-oriented development strategies, dependent on foreign firm production and foreign capital, create greater demand for high-skilled workers. Bottom-up development strategies depend on rural upgrading and land-centered urbanization, two processes that dislodge rural residents from their land and create incentives for the local government to target the most local migrants for inclusion, regardless of their skill level. Top-down development in impoverished areas, in which development goals are set and financed from outside the municipality, lacks the underlying economic mechanisms to drive naturalization, unless it is directly related to policy goals, such as poverty alleviation resettlement. As shown in other new regionalism studies (Rithmire 2013b), the overarching driver of variation is that similar policies implemented from the top down interact with existing institutional arrangements—namely, development policies—and result in subnational variation.
Finally, because local citizenship regimes expanded access to citizenship rights by creating more opportunities for naturalization, individual choices became increasingly important in understanding who, in the end, gets access to citizenship. Internal migrants, no longer dispatched to labor assignments by central planners, have agency to naturalize or not, depending on individual cost-benefit decisions. Even the most open and inclusive policies will not expand citizenship rights if migrants choose not to naturalize.
Key Contributions
MEMBERSHIP IN AUTHORITARIAN REDISTRIBUTION
A primary contribution of this work is its application of the citizenship framework to identify who enjoys authoritarian redistribution. By focusing on the manipulation of local citizenship membership within one policy, this book adds a dynamic perspective of who benefits from authoritarian redistribution. This book shifts the focus from the what and why of redistribution, which dominates the authoritarian welfare literature, to the connection between why and how redistribution occurs.
Most of our understanding of authoritarian redistribution through welfare stems from the basic logic of the selectorate theory. Although autocracies redistribute less than democracies (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006; Ansell 2008; Boix 2003; Haggard and Kaufman 2009), redistribution through welfare provision benefits autocratic longevity. Redistribution through welfare helps pay off supporters and buy off would-be challengers25 or enmeshes populations in state institutions to repress, co-opt, or coerce support.26
This book contributes to this literature in two key ways. First, it concentrates on the who and how of authoritarian redistribution. Who receives welfare regularly boils down to regime insiders versus outsiders, to elites versus the masses.27 It breaks down these general inclusion and exclusion criteria to provide a more nuanced explanation of variation within the masses. The focus on internal citizenship institutions and how membership defines entitlements to redistribution provides a broader yet still practical understanding of how authoritarian redistribution functions and, perhaps more importantly, how redistribution changes.
Second, this book contributes to the field of authoritarian welfare as a tool for economic development. Autocratic systems can provide welfare to advance development outcomes, including in the context of globalization.28 This study expands on the security and economic imperatives for welfare distribution, showing how multilevel policy making complicates the motivations for redistribution by allowing multiple drivers to coexist and interact. Specifically, I argue that security concerns of the central government drive the continuity in China’s internal citizenship regimes, but security alone cannot explain variation in policy outcomes. Economic development policies encouraged the center to decentralize redistribution. Local authorities benefit from the system’s security-enhancing features but drive variation in policy implementation to support local economic development.
This book relocates exclusion in citizenship below the national level. Studies of citizenship across regime types take the national level as the most important location for inclusion and exclusion in citizenship. Although this is sometimes appropriate, membership operates below the national level in many contexts.29 And local-level exclusion occurs both in rights and in membership, such that local limitations to citizenship membership undermine the value and protections of national-level citizenship. I argue that this local level of exclusion is inherent in nondemocratic citizenship, but lessons can be drawn for democratic contexts as well, where laws and regulations formally or informally segregate populations, limiting their access to government services and protections.
HUKOU AND LOCAL CITIZENSHIP
The citizenship framework also adds to our understanding of the hukou specifically. While others have also described hukou as citizenship, this analysis contextualizes hukou as a comprehensive citizenship institution, concentrating on membership from a theoretical perspective.
The Chinese hukou is one of the most important institutions in modern Chinese society. It is often blamed for being the root of structural inequality in China, while also identified as one ingredient in China’s economic rise (Chan 2009; Cheng 1991; Liu 2005; Solinger 1999; Wang 2005). Scholars in many disciplines have studied the hukou system because of its social, political, and economic impacts. The bulk of studies on hukou concern hukou-constrained migration, both explicitly through migration controls and implicitly because of migration’s welfare consequences.30 Scholars identified the institutional changes31 and durability through periods of reform.32 Research from the reform period after 1980 focuses on how the hukou institutionalizes inequality to affect social identity,33 labor market outcomes,34 and access to welfare and government services.35
Framing hukou as a citizenship institution also has its origin in existing research because it defines membership in the polity that provides the bulk of citizenship rights (Smart and Smart 2001; Vortherms 2015, 2021). As Solinger (1999) argues, the state commodified migrants when it introduced market forces but never fully considered, or treated, them as citizens. This expanded the urban-rural inequality seeded during the command economy era, keeping rural migrant workers eager to improve their situation as second-class citizens and limited by the exclusionary structure imposed by local states.
My focus on membership, and in particular the incentives to expand membership in this formerly closed system, adds complexity to existing understandings of hukou as primarily an institution of exclusion.36 The hukou no doubt provides the state with powerful exclusionary tools that allowed continued social stability and economic growth through inequality, but the previous focus on exclusion and control creates an excessive dependence on the security incentives for local citizenship.
This study moves beyond security and the continuation of the national-level regime to explain the highly fractured subnational functioning of control, which necessitates an added economic lens. Economic development encourages exclusion to make resources stretch further, but it also stimulates expansion when development depends on greater inclusion. Thus, this work examines strategic inclusion—who gains the privileged included status when—and inherent, security-driven exclusion.
I argue that development creates incentives to liberalize the hukou system.37 But unlike previous studies, my study disaggregates this economic mechanism. I contend that economically driven liberalization is not a question of a state retreating from economic management but rather one actively participating in labor allocation through the decentralized management of the hukou system. This added, more nuanced role played by economic development necessitates a multilevel analysis, of understanding the hukou system from both the central and the local levels. This book shows that the subnational level is where these security and economic logics collide to create a highly varied system of local citizenship.
CENTRAL, LOCAL, AND INDIVIDUAL EFFECTS ON ACCESS TO CITIZENSHIP
Multilevel factors drive access to citizenship rights. Variation in access to citizenship rights, this study’s key outcome, depends on central-, local-, and individual-level interactions with hukou policies. Each level of analysis provides its own perspective. The central perspective tells a story of security maintenance and macrolevel economic development coordination. The local perspective highlights the rising importance of local economic development policies in generating variation in the day-to-day functioning of the hukou system. Because central policy encourages voluntarism, or eligible individuals’ ability to choose to change their hukou or not, individual cost-benefit calculations provide the final piece of the puzzle explaining variation in who gets access to citizenship rights and who remains excluded. Understanding variation in access to citizenship depends on all three levels of analysis. Limiting analysis to only one level oversimplifies the complexity of China’s internal citizenship regimes. This multilevel analysis incorporates not only the often-ignored individual level but also the interplay among levels to provide a more holistic picture of citizenship in China.
Consideration of the interactions among these three levels of analysis is essential for understanding how and why access to citizenship varies. Omitting any one level ignores the interplay of incentives for expanding or restricting local citizenship membership. A focus on the center would lead to an oversecuritized understanding of variation. A focus on the local level would lead observers to a principal-agent framework, in which variation occurs because of improperly controlled local governments. But as I argue here, local variation is not itself a bug but a feature of central-government management. By drawing on an original, representative survey from two cities, I show that the individual level sketches a generalizable picture of the vast variation in demand for hukou and provides context for the consequences of these policies. Without this level of analysis, the decline of the hukou system might seem more likely than warranted.
Notes
1. The 2020 census estimates the internal migrant population, those who cross administrative boundaries and thus lack local citizenship, at 376 million people (NBS 2021a).
2. For example, out of thirty-seven chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, three chapters—on mesolevel citizenship (Chung 2017), on citizenship in “transition” states (Shevel 2017), and on postcolonial citizenship (Sadiq 2017)—are dedicated to citizenship outside the Western, democratic context. None directly address the content of authoritarian citizenship. Other chapters engage partially with non-Western or nondemocratic contexts, including one on Gulf States as immigrant-receiving states (Joppke 2017) and another on performative citizenship in nondemocracies (Isin 2017).
3. On subjecthood and citizenship, see Lohr (2012).
4. According to the Varieties of Democracy project, 54 percent of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule (Lührmann et al. 2020).
5. For example, participatory institutions, such as local elections and small-scale deliberative democracy, allow individuals to create democratic influence on governance outcomes through grassroots activities (He 2018; O’Brien 2001; O’Brien and Li 2000; Xia and Guan 2017).
6. Individuals perform citizenship under authoritarian rule by making claims on the state (Brown 2021; Distelhorst and Fu 2019; Isin 2017). Even in authoritarian settings, individuals carve out space to perform acts of citizenship (Ong 1999; Saeidi 2010). Individuals contest and claim citizenship, whether that means democratic norms of citizenship or broader socioeconomic rights of belonging (Goldman 2007; Solinger 1999).
7. Existing literature in this area is relatively limited. Autocrats shape national-level citizenship to balance redistribution among local populations and immigration needs of economic development processes (Shin 2017). Autocrats also use citizenship education to shape identity (Jones 2018; Nasir and Turner 2013). Much less is known about citizenship variation inside autocratic states.
8. On citizenship boundaries and membership, see Lohr (2012).
9. See, for example, Feinberg (2006) on how preservation of traditional gendered family norms undermined democratic citizenship for women.
10. For example, Skocpol (1995) demonstrates how veterans and women organized after the Civil War to establish early social benefits such as pensions in the United States, known as a relatively weak welfare state. But as the Civil War generation declined, so too did these welfare benefits, and the US welfare system reverted to its less generous form.
11. The idea of internal citizenship can be similar to what Maas (2017) calls multilevel citizenship in democracies when defined geographically. Individuals hold both a national citizenship and a local citizenship, which more directly defines the individual-state relationship because of local rights provisions.
12. On formal, industrial employment bestowing access to citizenship rights under the António de Oliveira Salazar (Portugal) and Francisco Franco (Spain) dictatorships, see Pinto (2012).
13. Apartheid South Africa and the Bantustan system is a quintessential case of race-based citizenship. Black South Africans were stripped of citizenship rights and geographically isolated from white full citizens (Claassens 2014).
14. Religious minorities are regularly stripped of citizenship rights, including in Turkey (Yılmaz and Turner 2019), China’s northwest (Byler 2021), and Myanmar (Boyraz 2019).
15. Nonlocal populations also face discriminatory practices in access to education, loans, jobs in the state sector, and medical insurance, such as higher fees, restricted access, and outright denial of services (Huang 2014; Zhang 2012). For example, one white-collar worker without local hukou in southern China was reimbursed for only 25 percent of a hospital bill for surgery because the worker’s health insurance was in a different province (Interview 44150707).
16. Before 1999, hukou status was inherited only matrilineally.
17. Rubins (1998) identifies two types of internal migration systems: permit based and notification based. Notification based systems simply require individuals to notify the state of internal movements, whereas permit-based systems require individuals to gain formal permission from the state to relocate.
18. Chinese economic and social institutions, based on the Soviet system, divide society into urban and rural systems managed separately (Chan and Wei 2019). The hukou is a key institution dividing the population into these two management systems.
19. China has four levels of subnational government: provincial, municipal (sometimes called prefectural), county, and township. This analysis uses municipality to refer to China’s 333 prefectural-level cities (地级市), which include an urban core, rural counties, and in some cases, satellite county-level cities. I use municipality instead of prefecture because it aligns better with comparative cases.
20. See, for example, Wang (2005), which argues that the hukou allows the Chinese Communist Party to organize the economy by excluding individuals from redistribution, thus protecting state resources.
21. As Pan (2020) argues, government redistribution can be used to repress groups that threaten the regime.
22. Chengdu is larger than Xi’an (21 million versus 12 million people in 2020), has a higher proportion of migrants (41 percent of the total population compared with 34 percent), and it is more ethnically diverse (1.86 percent compared with 1.04 percent minority populations), all of which are traditional security concerns in China (NBS 2021a, c).
23. Rights consciousness refers to popular movements that target fundamental, ideological rights that individuals should have from the state and directly challenge the regime’s order. Rules consciousness refers to accepting institutional rules as they are with mass movements focused on the application of those rules. See Li (2010) for a discussion of rights versus rules consciousness.
24. On market reform and hukou change in the cities of Beijing, Shenzhen, and Chongqing, see Young (2013).
25. Even modern democratic welfare states in Europe began as a means of preventing regime change (Esping-Andersen 1990). On welfare and the selectorate theory, see Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) and Haber (2006). On welfare as a tool to buy off challengers, see Haggard and Kaufman (2009); Knutsen and Rasmussen (2017); and Gandhi (2008).
26. On welfare and coercion, see Albertus, Fenner, and Slater (2018). On repression, see Pan (2020).
27. On who benefits from welfare, see Desai and Rudra (2019); Rudra (2008); Rudra and Tobin (2017); Huang (2020); and Yang (2021).
28. See, for example, Ansell (2008) and Wintrobe (1998).
29. This builds on work addressing mesolevel citizenship (Chung 2017) and multilevel citizenship (Maas 2017).
30. See, for example, Chan and Zhang (1999) and Chan, Liu, and Yang (1999). For a discussion of migration and more recent hukou policies, see Mu et al. (2021).
31. See, for example, Cheng and Selden (1994) and Cheng (1991).
32. See, for example, Chan (2009); Chan and Buckingham (2008); and Zhang (2008).
33. For discussion of social identity and hukou, see, for example, Afridi, Li, and Ren (2015).
34. The literature on wage and employment inequality is vast. For a selection of approaches, see Song (2014, 2015); Wu and Treiman (2007); Guo and Iredale (2004); and Liu (2005).
35. Many studies show the difference in access to welfare based on hukou registration, often using hukou as a control variable in service acquisition. For discussions that center hukou in the discussion of welfare, see Cai (2011); Yang (2021); Huang (2020); and Solinger (1999).
36. See, for example, Wallace (2014) and Wang (2004, 2005).
37. A related study by Young (2013) argues that hukou reform stems from marketization. Although marketization plays a role in development, this angle ignores the ways in which the central and local states use labor management long after dismantling the command economy.