Why is China's household registration system so resilient, and why are migrant workers consistently excluded from equal urban welfare? By disaggregating the hukou and land components of the rural–urban dualist regime, this article argues that dualist land ownership, formalized in China's 1982 Constitution, perpetuates the hukou system and unequal welfare rights. On the one hand, dualist land ownership results in an abundance of low-cost, informal housing in urban villages. This reduces the cost of short-term labour reproduction and diminishes migrants’ demands for state-defined urban rights. On the other hand, dualist land ownership enables local governments to amass significant revenues from land sales. The prominence of land-based revenues prompts local governments to link urban welfare rights with formal property ownership and residency, obstructing substantive reforms to the hukou system. For comparison, this article highlights Vietnam, a communist country with a unitary land ownership system, which has made greater strides in reforming its household registration system.

This study exploits rich data sources to investigate city-level patterns of internal migration policies in response to the reform of Chinese household registration and the economic, political and sociocultural determinants that drive policy approaches. First, we collected and systematically coded policy documents from 231 cities. Cluster analyses showed that the majority of cities (63%) adopted less lenient selection policies while offering integrative social welfare policies. Rights to internal migration remain selectively granted in China, yet rights to welfare have become more equitable than they were in the past because of the reform. Second, multinomial regression analyses showed that economic development and growth are related to selection policies that are more lenient towards high-skilled migrants, whereas top-down controls of superior governments, local politicians’ characteristics (e.g. tenure concerns and hometown favouritism) and migrants’ sociocultural environments (e.g. pre-existing labour disputes) account for both selection and integration policies.

This article addresses three main issues: the relationship between commute time and sickness absence, the heterogeneity of the commuting–absenteeism effect between rural migrants and urban citizens, and the effect of China’s Hukou system on the commuting–absenteeism effect. It applies a unique set of employer–employee matched data in China and a zero-inflated negative binomial model. We find clear evidence that a longer commuting time contributes to an increase in sickness absence. The heterogeneity of the commuting–absenteeism effect can also be confirmed: longer commuting leads to higher absence rates for urban citizens but not for rural migrants. Furthermore, we explore the effect of commuting on a set of health-related outcomes. The estimations demonstrate that commuting time has a significant impact on health-related outcomes for both migrants and urban citizens, but unequal access to housing provision and to social health insurance in the Hukou system may mean that rural migrants resort to more informal medical services and thus lack access to the official sickness certificate required to seek legal sickness absence. We recommend accelerated reform of the Hukou system to encourage rural workers to seek appropriate and timely medical services, thereby reducing public health risks.

Chinese employers practise extensive personal screening of applicants during the recruitment process. This study identifies four motives for these practices – statistical, customer taste, employer taste and regulatory. It discusses their distinctive roles in the Chinese labour market and in regard to labour-market regulations. Using a convenience sample of large Chinese employers, the study evaluates the economic and institutional determinants of screening approaches and implications for firms’ performance. Statistical screening, based on the assumption that social group membership is an indicator of productivity or loyalty, is found to be related positively to employers’ capitalisation, labour-market power and private ownership, and negatively to skill supply in provincial markets. Customer-taste screening is prevalent in the services and sales sectors, and interestingly in wealthy first-tier cities. Employer-taste screening endures in privately owned firms, and in skill-intensive industries and first-tier cities, and appears linked to customer-taste screening. Some forms of screening breach anti-discrimination laws and persist because of lax enforcement of such laws, but requests for personal data on job applications forms may also reflect compliance with equity indicators. Regulatory compliance-based screening is related positively to firms’ market power, capitalisation and state ownership. The implications of the different screening practices for public policy and corporate strategy are examined.

Within the welfare deservingness literature, the question of how people conceive of deservingness criteria is still underexplored. Theoretical insights indicate that identity and reciprocity criteria are more fluidly conceived by people than much deservingness literature describes. Through a qualitative analysis, I explore how Chinese people evaluate the deservingness of a group of Chinese nationals (identity) who contribute (reciprocity) but are excluded from welfare: intranational Chinese migrants. I find that Chinese people have multiple conceptions of identity and reciprocity criteria. Some conceive of identity through larger communities, such as the nation, while others conceive of it through local communities, such as the family. Reciprocity can be conceived of in a less conditional way, which means that contributions generally make one deserving, and in a more conditional way, where one’s deservingness depends on one’s ability to make more specific kinds of contributions. Welfare recipients’ deservingness becomes very dependent on respondents’ conceptions of these deservingness criteria.

Research to-date has examined the impact of intergenerational support in terms of isolated types of support, or at one point in time, failing to provide strong evidence of the complex effect of support on older persons’ wellbeing. Using the Harmonised China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011, 2013 and 2015), this paper investigates the impact of older people's living arrangements and intergenerational support provision/receipt on their physical and psychological wellbeing, focusing on rural–urban differences. The results show that receiving economic support from one's adult children was a stronger predictor for higher life satisfaction among rural residents compared to urban residents, while grandchild care provision was an important determinant for poor life satisfaction only for urban residents. Having weekly in-person and distant contact with one's adult children reduced the risk of depression in both rural and urban residents. Older women were more likely than men to receive support and to have contact with adult children, but also to report poor functional status and depression. The paper shows that it is important to improve the level of public economic transfers and public social care towards vulnerable older people in rural areas, and more emphasis should be placed on improving the psychological wellbeing of urban older residents, such as with the early diagnosis of depression.

This article presents evidence that factors in rural areas influence migrant integration into China's cities. We argue that the value of the rural registration influences migrants' decision-making and identities by creating a cost to registration transfer to the city, and that the rural land system interacts with the household registration system to inhibit migrant integration. We test novel hypotheses derived from a simple model of migrant integration, finding connections between rural sending area factors and migrant integration in the city. We test these hypotheses using survey data from two surveys of rural-to-urban migrant workers and publicly available economic data. We find that migrants from areas with higher levels of economic development are less likely to desire registration transfer to the city. We also find that landholding and weaker rural and rights are associated with lower levels of social integration in the city.

In recent years, the Chinese central state has launched the “new socialist countryside” campaign (NSCC), which authorizes the local state expropriation of rural land from farmers, and then incorporates evicted farmers into township residence and urban citizenship. In affected regions, this campaign enables local state officials to enact practices of bureaucratic absorption that undermine potential resistance by bringing resisters into formal channels of bargaining through both juridical and ideological means. Based on ethnographic data from Sichuan province, this article reveals an in situ process of bureaucratic absorption in “Lan-ding village,” where the incorporation of rural residents into urban citizenship enables the depoliticization of resistance to land expropriation, first by changing the citizenship-based grounds on which legitimate claims to land can be made, then by discursively reframing eviction as a normative shift towards modern wage dependence.

This paper examined the relationships between family relations and life satisfaction between the two groups of older people with different hukous in Putian, Fujian, China. Five factors related to family relations: family support network, satisfaction with family support, family harmony, filial support and filial discrepancy, were included in the study. A total of 532 valid questionnaires, 263 and 269 being filled in by older people with agricultural and non-agricultural hukous, respectively, were obtained. Bivariate analyses indicated that five factors were correlated significantly with life satisfaction for both groups of older people. The results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that when controlling for socio-demographic variables, filial support was associated with life satisfaction for both groups of older people; satisfaction with family support and filial discrepancy was only associated with life satisfaction among older people with agricultural hukous; family harmony only contributed to explaining life satisfaction among older people with non-agricultural hukous. The present study confirmed some previous empirical findings, which indicated the importance of family relations to older people's lives, and extended our understanding about the correlates of life satisfaction for the two groups of older people with different hukous in China. Limitations and direction of future studies were also addressed. Meanwhile, the policy and practice implications of the study were discussed in the context of China's social and economic changes.