The Chinese State, Incomplete Proletarianization and Structures of Inequality in Two Epochs by Wu Jieh-min, Mark Selden

“…The Chinese household registration system (hukou) has played a pivotal role in the “regulation” of the formation of the working class under conditions of free and unfree markets, in ways that invite comparison with the Act of Settlement in England prior to the era of the Speenhamland system, which hindered the movement of rural labor.5 The hukou regime has imposed conditions of severe inequality on migrants and their families, initially in the years 1960 to the late 1970s when rural to urban migration and market activity were virtually foreclosed, but also in the subsequent era when the state encouraged migration and market activity, while maintaining differential access to education, health care, retirement pensions etc., distinguishing those “sojourning” in the cities from those with full urban citizen rights on the basis of hukou.6Less studied, but equally important, in our view, is the interrelationship between inequality, on the one hand, and savings and underconsumption, on the other. …”
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