with almost all agricultural-type hukou citizens resident in rural areas and all non-agricultural type hukou citizens resident in urban areas. After the reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping and the easing of movement restrictions, rural migrant laborers have increasingly entered the cities. Figure 1, taken from Chan (2009: 211), highlights these changes by comparing the composition in hukou type of urban and rural de facto populations between 1965 and 2000. The figure shows pyramids of four strata representing quartiles of income, with the widths scaled in proportion to estimated de facto populations. [Insert Figure 1] As Chan (2009) concludes, “if Karl Marx once remarked that the history of capitalism is a history of exploitation and suffering of the industrial proletariat . . . it may be reasoned that the history of the post-1949 industrialization in China has been one of exploitation and sacrifice of the peasantry” (215). The Mao-led CCP developed the hukou system into a instrument of social control that assigned immutable, hereditary status to all citizens, disenfranchising everyone of their right to migrate and rural residents from vital services and welfare entitlements such as employment, housing, food, water, sewage disposal, transportation, medical facilities, schools, subsidized health care, and retirement benefits (Cheng and Selden 1999; Chan 2009). Especially after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the Mao-led CCP utilized the hukou system to extract resources at artificially low prices from the rural countryside, binding the peasant farmers to the land and forcing them to work at subsistence wages (or less in years of famine). While the hukou system has weakened since the 1980’s, it remains in force today and is still the anchor of China’s system of social control (Chan 2009).
1949 and the first Constitution in 1954. In sharp contrast to these promises, “the hukou system made it possible to bind China’s rural population in a subaltern position on land it did not own and could not leave” (Cheng and Selden 1999: 668). I argue that this form of social and economic control is unprecedented in China history. Ironically, Mao Zedong liked to compare himself to the greatest leaders from Chinese antiquity while slandering their governments as universally “feudalistic.” Mao’s famous 1945 poem asks who was the greatest leader in Chinese history, comparing himself favorably to the emperor Tang Taizong. It is indeed very appropriate to analyze the Maoist hukou system in historical context in comparison to the huji system implemented under Tang Taizong to truly appreciate how unprecedented the current system of social control is. Compared to Maoist China, Tang dynasty society under the emperor Tang Taizong in many ways exhibited greater social mobility, and this is partly due to the differences between the hukou and huji systems. While the Maoist hukou system binds rural peasants to the land forcing them to work at subsistence levels, the ancient Chinese never pursued a policy of modified slavery that bound peasants to manors such as with serfdom in medieval Europe. On the contrary, Chinese society has never once implemented a large-scale intrusive mode of systematic slavery, but instead had limited numbers of slaves expressed always in an extrusive fashion: as punishment for crimes by citizens (Patterson 1982:42–43). This is fundamentally different from feudalism in Europe, and even among neighbors in Asia, such as Koryo Korea and Shogunate Japan, which did employ slavery not limited to criminal punishment (Patterson 1982:42). Instead, the peasant farmers of Tang dynasty China owned a percentage of the land they farmed, could inherit land from their relatives, and were free persons able to move away from their land. The Tang