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Social Change and Challenges
Quick questions on Urbanisation, migration and the hukou system explained: H2 China Studies
6short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is the great migration?Show answer
Reform-era growth set in motion one of the largest human migrations in history. As farm reform freed up rural labour and coastal industry boomed, hundreds of millions of people moved from the countryside to the cities in search of work. The urban share of the population rose dramatically, from a small minority at the start of reform to a majority by the 2010s, transforming China from an overwhelmingly rural society into an urban one within a few decades. This migrant workforce built the cities, staffed the export factories, and was the human foundation of the low-cost manufacturing model.
What is the politics of reform?Show answer
The strongest answers address why a system so widely criticised has been so hard to reform. The leadership has recognised the problems and pursued gradual hukou reform, easing registration requirements, especially in smaller and medium-sized cities, and in principle extending more services to migrants. But reform has been slow and uneven, and the largest, most desirable cities have kept tight controls. The obstacle is fiscal and political: granting full urban rights to hundreds of millions of migrants would impose enormous costs on city governments for schooling, healthcare, pensions and housing, and would require resources and redistribution that are difficult to mobilise.
What is weighing the system?Show answer
The most accurate judgement is that the hukou system was both a functional support of China's growth and a genuine source of social division. It supplied the cheap, flexible labour the model depended on while limiting urban welfare costs, and in doing so it created a stratified society of second-class urban residents, left-behind children and entrenched rural-urban inequality. Reform is underway but partial, because the costs of full urbanisation are large. The institution therefore captures, in a single device, both the achievement and the cost of China's breakneck urbanisation.
What is q1?Show answer
Explain what the hukou system ties to a person's registration. [4 marks]
What is q2?Show answer
Explain why the hukou system supported China's low-cost growth model. [12 marks]
What is q3?Show answer
"China's urbanisation is incomplete." How far do you agree? [20 marks]
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