In China, there’s a Hukou system of household registration. It makes internal migration difficult, especially for rural residents who wants to move to urban areas.

The system was used as far back as the Han Dynasty for tax collection. In ancient China, 90% of the population was engaged in agriculture. The main income of the government came from the poll tax and the corvée. If you run away, it means reduction of their income. So every dynasty emphasized agriculture and suppressed business. The governments wanted everyone to be a peasant.

People need permission to travel. For example, in the Ming Dynasty, anyone who wanted to travel more than a hundred miles from his home, he had to obtain a permit document from the local government first. If someone traveled without a permission, he would be arrested and charged.

This system was still used by the Chinese Communist Party to separate urban people from rural people. Before the economic reforms, China was a highly closed society. The city and the countryside were fully separated by Hukou. Anyone travelling outside his hometown must obtain prior approval. The approval document was called a letter of introduction. The letter of introduction had another function, travelers can exchange their hometown food stamps for local food stamps. Without local food stamps, no one can buy food. You may think, if you couldn’t buy any food, could you go to a restaurant to eat? The answer was No. Because if you didn’t give the restaurant food stamps, the restaurant also couldn’t buy any food ingredients.

From 1961 to 2003, the Communist Party also implemented the “Custody and Repatriation System”. Rural people who went to cities without reason were called “Three No Populations”, that is, no legal documents, no fixed residence and no stable income. The police would send them back to their hometown, in the name of maintaining the city’s appearance.

After the economic reforms in 1978, The number of migrant workers from the interior provinces to the southeast coast was increasing. But the “Custody and Repatriation System” was still in place. So in 2003, the Sun Zhigang incident happened.

Sun Zhigang was born in Hubei, graduated from Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and was hired by a garment company in Guangzhou after graduation. Since just arriving in Guangzhou, he had not yet applied for a temporary living permit. On day, he went out without his ID. Then he was taken away by the police, and sent to the shelter as a “Three No Population”, even though actually he wasn’t. At last he was beaten to death by the administrator of the shelter.

At that time, there were very few university graduates. This incident caused a lot of public outrage. Finally, the Communist Party decided to abolish the “Custody and Repatriation System” in order to allow more migrant workers to enter the manufacturing industry. It has been less than 20 years since then, let alone ancient times. And only because it was unfavorable to economic development, not human rights.

In recent years, many people moved to places in which they didn’t have a local hukou. They could live there legally without local hukou, but local governments disregarded the welfare of them. Such as subsidized schooling, subsidized housing, and health insurance. There is still no full freedom of movement in China, now and for the foreseeable future.