The question of hukou’s demise, however, is as old as China’s capitalist reforms. In 1994, when mass rural–urban migration was only just beginning, the South China Morning Post ran the headline “Registration System Set to Be Abolished.” It wasn’t, but six years later the State Development Planning Commission announced that China “aims to abolish the system over the next five years.”

Four years after that, the New York Times credulously reported, “China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces.” In response to this anthology of dashed hopes, misinterpretations, and some bad-faith propaganda, Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham penned a landmark article in the China Quarterly in 2008 in which they answered definitively: no, the hukou may be changing, but it is not going away.

In the nearly two decades since Chan and Buckingham’s article, the debate has not gone away. Notably, the central government announced a “new urbanization” plan in 2013 which called for hukou to be “based on a person’s place of residence and job” by 2020.

As part of the effort to drum up support for the new plan, state media reported that Xi Jinping himself had argued in his 2001 dissertation that “the historical trend points to the abolition of the hukou system” and that access to social services should be leveled out. Three decades after that SCMP headline proclaimed the demise of hukou, the Global Times, less confident than their late twentieth-century counterparts, wondered, “Is China’s Household Registration Disappearing?”

The above is merely a précis of the Groundhog Day–like reiteration of this hopeful, perhaps dewy-eyed question over the decades. Why then, despite seeming consensus from the central state and its critics alike, did hukou persist? While it certainly has not been abolished, what has changed? What, if anything, makes this current moment different? And what might an actually liberatory hukou abolition look like?

The hukou is, above all, a tool for realizing enhanced exploitation of the rural population through mobility control. Based on the Soviet propiska internal passport system, the modern instantiation of hukou was implemented in 1958. This new system linked the provision of social goods to a specific place.

Leaving one’s place of official hukou registration meant forsaking access to state-provided goods, including health care, education, pensions, and, at the time, food. The population was divided up into urban and rural populations, with the former enjoying greater access to services while the latter enjoyed collective property rights in the countryside.

Equally important, and often overlooked, is that people were pinned to a specific city or village; a person could not move from a small provincial city in Shanxi to Beijing just as they pleased, for example. The hierarchy among cities is often as important as that between rural and urban places.

Finally, hukou was and remains a highly fragmented institution, as it is administered by the police at the prefectural level. The central government thus has limited control over how localities regulate local citizenship.

The hukou-enforced mobility regime has taken on different contours amid China’s dramatic political-economic shifts. Pinning the peasantry in place was essential for Mao Zedong–era primitive accumulation, as the “price scissors” were used to extract value from the countryside to invest in heavy industry. But when coastal areas opened to private capital in the 1980s, this vast, cheap, and politically excluded “surplus labor” was designated as China’s comparative advantage in luring capital first to the special economic zones (SEZs) and then more broadly.

Until the early 2000s, police would harass and detain people they suspected of being illegal migrants, deporting them back to their rural holding pen if they could not produce a “temporary residence permit.” This system allowed cities to access rural labor in a “just-in-time” manner, absorbing energetic young people to labor in the city for their prime working years and expelling them back to village once their bodies or souls were broken.

City governments colluded with transnational corporate behemoths to dredge billions from this politically repressed working class, while sloughing off the costs of education, maintenance, and eldercare onto the countryside. In this sense, hukou and its attendant exploitation of the migrant working class was perhaps the key social institution undergirding the (now bygone) generation of capital-centric Sino-American bonhomie. Whereas in the Mao era peasants were confined to the poverty of the countryside, in the era of capitalist transformation they were physically relocated to the city while laboring under the sign of disposability.

This extractive relationship to the hinterland was, and still is, reinforced by a highly decentralized system of social welfare. From the 1990s on, a growing share of the fiscal burden for service provision has fallen on local governments. The unsurprising consequence of this has been growing inequalities in the quality and scope of social goods.

Beijing citizens enjoy access to good hospitals, relatively generous pensions, and preferential access to the country’s best schools and universities. On the other hand, their counterparts just across the border in Hebei Province face austerity so severe that this past winter many could not afford to heat their homes.

In the protectionist-nativist accounting of many urban residents, each additional peasant allowed into the city is one less hospital bed for their parents, one less university seat for their children. Hukou abolition would dramatically alter the biopolitical calculus of the key nodes of power in Chinese society.

Here we have the material basis of urban nativism: exporters (and their supply chain overlords, a growing share of whom are Chinese rather than foreign) want cheap labor, and urban residents want preferential access to state-subsidized infrastructures of social reproduction. These are two of the most powerful groups in the country. A genuinely progressive abolition of hukou thus would mean not only allowing people to move freely around the country — the narrow vision of freedom promoted by neoliberals — but a dramatic leveling up of social protections so that one need not live in a rich megacity to enjoy quality services.

This would entail breaking open fiscally decentralized urban citadels and reorganizing systems of retirement, health insurance, and education from the national level on down. Rich-city privilege would be undermined in the service of national equality. The children of Beijing’s officials would face much sharper competition as they tried to get into Peking University and Tsinghua. Cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen would have to surrender control over hundreds of billions of yuan in their city’s pension funds.

Such a project would be enormously expensive and would need to be funded by taxes on the rich and on capital. It could also drive up the cost of business and undermine China’s (problematically) dominant export machine. It is precisely because deep hukou abolition entails profound fiscal and social reform that it has been quietly opposed, undermined, and diluted across the decades.

That said, China’s mobility regime has changed. Perhaps the single most important reform came in 2003 after migrant Sun Zhigang, unable to produce a residency permit, was taken into custody and beaten to death by police in Guangzhou. When it was later discovered that Sun was a university graduate (and therefore not “merely” a migrant worker), it caused a public furor, leading directly to the elimination of the notorious system of “custody and repatriation.” Although hukou continues to be housed in and enforced by local police, cops lost the legal right to deport rural residents from the city — a major win for social justice.

In general, hukou has become less restrictive, and a much higher percentage of people are eligible for urban hukou than was the case a generation ago. Although there is unevenness in this highly fractured system, it has become easier for people within a given prefecture to switch from an agricultural to nonagricultural hukou, thereby granting access to social services. Particularly in small and medium-sized cities, where much of the growth in urbanization has been seen in recent years, it has become much easier for rural people to secure local urban hukou. The mobility regime has become less violent and less rigidly exclusionary.

While the urban/rural distinction has been relatively attenuated, transformation of the socio-spatial hierarchy has in fact produced new forms of inequality. Most importantly, the largest and wealthiest cities — not coincidentally, the places with the best social services by a huge margin — remain highly fortified bastions of privilege.

It is no longer hard for a farmer to secure hukou in a county town in Henan, for example, but the odds of winning Beijing citizenship and all it entails remain vanishingly small. In fact, many farmers living in small cities want to keep their rural hukou because of its attendant land rights: having rights to land is better than the paltry upgrade in services they would receive by switching to a small town urban hukou.

Modeled on Canada’s citizenship regime, big cities have deployed “point-based” hukou acquisition to filter the population, with property ownership being the most important metric for point accumulation. Similarly, many rich cities have deployed “human talent” programs that dangle the carrot of local citizenship for people possessing the right composition of human capital.

The consequence of this reorganized socio-spatial hierarchy is what I have described as the “inverted welfare state,” i.e., a system that funnels resources to the apex of the social structure and limits access to those nominally public resources to those who are already highly endowed with economic and cultural capital. Mao-era status distinctions served as the social division that freed up a dehumanized and exploitable chunk of the population to fuel the capitalist boom. While those old status distinctions linger on in the socio-spatial hierarchy, class reproduction has been increasingly driven by market-based difference.

Much, but not all, of the recent “Implementation Opinion on Promoting Basic Public Service Provision at Place of Residence” rehashes established rhetoric about incorporating non-hukou holders into social services. The opinion states its core objective as promoting “places of residence providing basic public services and gradually eliminating the connection between public services and residence.” It must also be noted, however, that many positive phrases ,such as “equalization,” that appear in this document have been standard fare for twenty years already.

The most optimistic statements are with respect to social insurance (i.e., unemployment, parental leave, workplace injury insurance, health insurance, and pensions). In notably direct language, the opinion calls to “comprehensively cancel” any restrictions on nonlocals participating in social insurance in their place of residence.

In my view, the single most interesting sentence in the opinion is this: “Improve national-level pooling for basic employee pensions,” while suggesting provincial-level pooling for health, workplace injury, and unemployment insurance. Fiscal centralization could be the single most important step for the central government to equalize social services, although the fact that this is but a single sentence should temper our expectations.

The opinion also addresses point-based residency or, “tiered public service provision.” This is a system which has allowed cities to grant access to public school and other services on a conditional basis, positively discriminating in favor of those who own property, have certain kinds of skills, and have paid local taxes for an extended time.

While reaffirming that localities can still employ point-based metrics, the opinion enjoins them to “gradually reduce the number of tiers . . . and to lower the bar of entry.” In some of the strongest language of the opinion, localities are told they “must not use highest degree, job title, or tax contributions as limiting factors,” [emphasis added] though the text is notably silent on home ownership.

There are, of course, some problems. The opinion leaves the door open to migrant discrimination by strategically deploying the ominous phrase that social services should be available “for those who meet the conditions.” This common term in education and social policy means that local governments can establish their own system for filtering access to services.

When it comes to one of the most contentious bastions of “tier 1” city privilege, the university entrance exam, the State Council gives cities a clear off-ramp. Rather than stating unequivocally that locality will no longer matter for university admissions, the opinion restates existing policy when it says that localities can allow migrant children who meet the conditions to take high school and university entrance exams.

We can be certain there will be no liberalization of university admissions in Beijing, Shanghai, or other megacities with top tier universities. The language of “those who meet the conditions” is also used with reference to public rental units and employment assistance. In key respects, the central government has explicitly given local governments a green light to continue to treat social services as a privilege, not a right.

Perhaps the most confounding problem is that pensions, health care, and unemployment are mediated by employment at just the moment when irregular and precarious forms of employment have exploded. According to the government’s own estimate, 40 percent of all urban employment is in so-called flexible labor (i.e., without the protection of a labor contract), and therefore mostly or entirely outside the social welfare system. Migrants are, without a doubt, dramatically overrepresented in the most precarious segment of the labor market.

The opinion contains standard, and heretofore meaningless, rhetoric about including irregular workers in social insurance plans. On the question of irregular workers, the best the opinion can muster is that there should be “research on policies for encouraging flexible workers [to participate in pensions].” This hardly inspires confidence. While it cannot be articulated directly, the State Council’s rudderlessness on the critical issue of irregular labor reveals an intuition that the resolution to the problem of unequal social services is increasingly one of class power.

Despite some of the commentarial bombast of recent weeks, this opinion represents the persistence of a marginalist, prodding approach to hukou reform. Given that powerful interests have derailed repeated calls to transcend hukou over the decades, are substantial changes more likely now than in the past?

On the one hand, there has never been a better time for China to build a status-neutral, national-level system of social service provision. China is richer than it has ever been, and its cities in particular concentrate enormous wealth. For decades, urban Malthusians claimed that cities could not exceed their “carrying capacity” and needed to keep filters in place. That argument is increasingly untenable when cities in particular face a precipitous drop in fertility and do not have enough children to fill the schools.

With close to zero international migration and population decline nationally, China has never had such a promising ratio between wealth and people. China’s social spending per capita is well below that of other countries at a similar level of development (and far below that of OECD countries), so even catching up to the average would signal major progress.

While structural capacity is clearly in place, the broader political landscape has become more hostile to universalist social spending. Xi is personally quite allergic to social protections, arguing in a prominent 2021 speech: “Even if we become more developed and financially stronger in the future, we should not set excessively high goals and provide excessive guarantees, in order not to fall into the trap of ‘welfarism’ that encourages laziness.”

Imperial rivalry with the United States, and economic rivalry with many more countries, has emboldened the right wing of the Chinese state to demand increased spending on technology and war. The most recent Five-Year Plan from March 2026 has an overwhelming focus on supply chains, national security, and technology — AI was the most cited term in the report by a sizable margin.

On the other hand, “Common Prosperity” was near the bottom, with its number of mentions more than halved from the previous Five-Year Plan. China’s vast resources are being funneled into developing marketable technologies, globe-spanning supply chain dominance, and military modernization and expansion. Not only are social protections a lower priority, Xi has made it clear the state wants to maintain the market to whip the masses.

Finally, as long as local governments are made to bear the cost of social protection, a robust social welfare system will be impossible. Localities around the country are facing fiscal crises due to the end of the real estate bubble, and many have already engaged in austerity cuts while some have failed to pay public employees on time.

The opinion makes no mention of new central government spending to support the increase in expenditures that hukou liberalization would necessarily entail. Without redistribution from the central government, localities will fiercely resist any new spending obligations.

Realizing a genuinely progressive hukou abolition would require immense political force to overcome resistance from privileged urbanites and capitalists addicted to super-exploited labor. That force cannot come from society, as social movements, and labor movements in particular, are anathema to the Communist Party of China.

It is also clear, given the state’s dithering and continual failure to realize its own stated aims of hukou reform and of increased domestic consumption, that there is not yet an internal bloc powerful enough to force major change. To the contrary, the forces against such fundamental reform are huge.

Yet hukou has changed and is beyond a doubt less central to social life than it was a generation ago. State-led gradualist reform has allowed a larger share of inequality to be structured by the market rather than hukou alone. Much as racial capitalism in the United States produces racist social outcomes without formal racial hierarchy, China is on a trajectory of ossifying social inequality but with diminished importance for the residual Maoist status hierarchy.

In the context of contemporary China’s hypercapitalist competition, hukou abolition is a necessary but increasingly insufficient step in securing the means to survive and flourish — without conditions.