The Hukou System and China's Rural Development

The dismantling of collective agriculture and the consequent decline of the hukou system have been welcomed by many Western scholars as a "liberation" of China's peasantry. In these scholars' accounts, the collective/hukou system by binding peasants to their home village formalized, rigidified, and perpetuated rural/urban inequality. These scholars see the hukou system mainly as a system of social control that (like baojia)I imposed a second-class status on the peasantry (some have even likened it to a caste system). They further claim that the collective system retarded rural economic development and by limiting peasant mobility also retarded national economic development, thus perpetuating poverty in the countryside. I grew up in rural China during the collective era and acutely felt the injustice of rural/urban inequality as well as the limitations imposed by having a rural hukou. On entering college in 1977, after working five years on a collective farm and in a village factory, I was exasperated to find that my classmates who had a nonagricultural hukou and had worked five years continued to receive salaries while studying in college. Those with an agricultural hukou like myself did not have salaries even though we had worked as long as they did. This different treatment was not the result of different job experiences. It was simply that those with a nonagricultural hukou had had their stay in the rural areas during shangshan xiaxiang yuandong (going up the mountains and down to the village movement) credited for their salary. Nevertheless, current scholarly discussion is one-sided. By presenting the dismantling of the collectives and the hukou system only as the "liberation" of the