China's rural migrant workers and the household registration system: A case study of the effects of the Shanghai Hukou system reforms in a citizenship perspective

Abstract: Since a series of economic reforms were introduced in China at the end of the 1970s, large numbers of rural people have flooded into urban areas to find employment but were excluded from the urban society in different ways. One important factor was associated with the Chinese household registration system. Even if rural migrant workers had lived and worked in the cities for years, they were not granted urban Hukou status, which prohibited them from receiving genuine citizen rights. However, in the beginning of the 1990s a series of Hukou system reforms were gradually carried out (most reforms started from the 2000s). Hence, this master thesis aims to examine the consequences of these reformed Hukou policies on rural migrant workers’ citizenship. A theoretical framework based on citizenship, migration and Weberian closure theories is used to offer an understanding of the mechanisms of different Hukou policies in regulating rural migrant workers’ access to full citizenship. A single-case study of Shanghai’s Hukou system reforms, qualitative analysis of official documents from central and local government as well as a secondary analysis of official statistics are used to answer the research questions. The findings show that the admittance standards of the reformed policies are not in the interests of the poor and low-educated rural migrant workers. The different residence permits that appeared in the Hukou reforms are in essence not the same thing as formal Hukou even if the citizen rights attached to them have been improved. The underlying motivations of these Hukou policies seem to have been to favor the elite and protect their local resources and benefits. Rural migrant workers are still excluded by being replaced as inferior citizens. The differentiation among citizens has been aggravated and rural migrant workers are still not experiencing full citizenship.