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For Those Who Meet the Conditions, by Eli Friedman – 2 June 2026

From Positions: Politics

Is China abolishing the hukou? Since the PRC’s State Council announced a new guideline on public services on May 18, 2026 this question has led to an outpouring of commentary. For decades, analysts from a wide range of political orientations have called for ending the hukou. Has the moment arrived? Most economists have argued that hukou introduces labor market imperfections and suppresses domestic consumption. Socialists and other progressives, on the other hand, have critiqued the tiered citizenship regime and widely differentiated access to social servies enshrined by the hukou’s mobility controls, seeing these as certain to reproduce stark inequalities across generations. The past few weeks have seen a rising chorus of optimism that this relic of the command economy is finally falling.

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, South China Morning Post ran the headline “Registration System Set to Be Abolished” (Chan and Buckingham 2008, 583). 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” (Xinhua 2001). Four years after that, The New York Times credulously reported, “China plans to abolish legal distinctions between urban residents and peasants in 11 provinces” (Kahn 2005). 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 (An 2013). 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 (China Daily 2014). Three decades after that SCMP headline proclaimed the demise of hukou, the Global Times—less confident than their late 20th century counterparts—wondered, “Is China’s Household Registration Disappearing?” (Global Times 2023)    

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?

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Eli Friedman is Professor of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University.

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