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A new book reveals China's Hukou system, a birth-based social stratification, intensified under Mao. It argues this system, unlike India's caste system, is often overlooked by Western scholars, restricting peasants' access to resources and mobility.
New Delhi: A new book on social history of India has documented an age-old practice in China for birth-based discrimination, perpetuated stringently after the rise of the Communist Rule in the country.
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The book argued that while western scholars spotlight India’s caste system, they fail to even acknowledge the Hukou (Hoju) system of China, which “is a strict birth-based social stratification”.
Documenting State-sanctioned social stratification in modern Maoist China, Aravindan Neelakandan in his book ‘A social Dharmic History of India’ wrote: “Traditional Chinese society had its own social discrimination like any other pre-modern society. The system called hukou (huji) allowed the authorities to assign a person’s place, role and resources available to him or her at birth.”
He further explained that the hukou system was “inherently biased against the ‘peasants’ or, in traditional Indian terminology, the ‘Shudras’. It severely restricted peasants’ access to quality education, medical services, and a decent lifestyle.”
“One would have expected Mao Zedong, the Marxist revolutionary, to abolish the hukou system lock stock and barrel. But despite all lip service to socialism and equality and ruthless experiments in Stalinist style, Mao made hukou even more rigid but profitable to the state machinery and party bureau elite,” added Neelakandan in the book.
Tracing the strict stratification of birth-based discriminations in China, Neelakandan further stated that “the socialist system, while eliminating market-based class distinctions, created a caste system where one’s status was determined at birth”.
“As industrialization and modernization began, there was an influx of peasants from villages to urban areas. Leaders of Mao’s Communist Party detested this,” added the author.
He gave the reference of the Mao’s men often quoting Chinese scholar Guo Tinglin, who said: “When the masses dwell in the villages, order prevails; when the masses flock to the cities, disorder prevails.”
Neelakandan further stated that the hukou system was based on where a person was residing.
“From 1959 onwards, the system became birth based and the residency status became inheritable. The anti-peasant masterstroke of the Maoist regime was that the inheritance was not patrilineal but matrilineal. Thus, in China, one has a system that is birth-based, with little possibility of any upward mobility,” he added in the book.
The author also wrote that “this system predominantly determines the allocation of resources and services – from food to health, quality of the education given, to the type of employment one gets”.
“It was only in 1998 that hukou inheritance was made possible also ‘by the biological or adoptive father’s hukou’,” he added.
Neelakandan further explained the evolution of the system, saying that “in the traditional pre-Maoist hukou system, social exclusion was directed towards those considered living on the fringe or socially undesirables. However, in China’s case, the system design was changed and implemented to exclude the masses.”
He quoted anthropologists Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, who studied Chinese society under Maoism, saying: “As a result, from the point of view of social control, Maoist Zengbu was a kind of bureaucratic feudalism, with party cadres closely controlling peasants who had been structurally immobilized in their teams. Peasants were separated from urban residents by legal restrictions creating a caste-like barrier against both geographical and social mobility that was virtually impenetrable.”
“If one was born a peasant, one remained a peasant for life and was not free to leave one’s team,” Neelakandan wrote in the book.
He stated that “by fixing peasants on the land, and having the team control their labor, the Maoist state created a set of serf-like conditions more classically ‘feudal’ than the pre-Liberation society, in which peasants controlled their own labor, and could leave their villages”.
He further writes in the book, saying that “what we have in China is an imposed system of largely birth-determined discrimination. And it is imposed by a totalitarian State with no space for reformist or emancipatory forces.”
“This is designed with the singular aim of strengthening the State ruthlessly while benefiting largely the elite and their posterity,” added Neelakandan.
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