The 'Iron Triangle'

[vexed]

Hello,

I hope I’m posting this in the right section.

I've recently be re-reading a book about China called 'China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power' by Kristof and Wudunn, and they mention a concept called the 'Iron Triangle’. This is composed of the three things which apparently control your life if you’re Chinese: the residence permit (hukou), the secret personnel file (dangan) and the work unit (danwei).

For example, if you want to move cities you have to get a different residence permit. If you make any ‘political mistakes’ then that goes in your personnel file and affects your chances of promotion. The work unit is necessary to have a baby, marry, change apartment and go abroad.

The book mentions that with economic and social change that this Iron Triangle is becoming less important. Since this book was written in the 1990’s I was wondering if the Iron Triangle is still as important and as controlling today as it was back then? Also, it mentions that it’s nigh on impossible to get a residence permit for Beijing (for example) if you originally came from a different province. Is that true?

Any insight into the current situation would be most enlightening.

[renzhe]

I know people who are not from Beijing who are working there right now.

[chrix]

The hukou issue was just in the news. There was an incident at the beginning of March, where 13 newspapers, among them my favourite Chinese newspaper, 南方周末 , published a joint editorial calling upon the People's Congress to reform the hukou system. See an article in the New York Times about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/asia/02china.html

So basically government benefits are tied to your hukou, but I've also read elsewhere (though the NY Times also alludes to this) that the hukou system is said to encourage corruption as non-locals have to rely on the goodwill of local government officials in certain matters, but I'm not exactly sure what this means. It certainly does not appear that white-collar workers cannot work in a city that doesn't match their hukou...

Oh renzhe, are you sure those people who are not from Beijing but working there actually don't have an urban permit? You can change your hukou, and it seems the better your job the easier it is.

Would be interesting to know what the exact rules are for Chinese people who want to work in Beijing or Shanghai, what formalities are there, and what the reality on the ground looks like.

Edited March 13, 2010 at 10:51 PM by chrix

[Erbse]

It certainly does not appear that white-collar workers cannot work in a city that doesn't match their hukou...

My guess is, if one is a white collar worker he might have a private health insurance, etc. so he won't rely on the securities associated with the hukou at all. Hukou is for the poor masses.

[Outofin]

dangan and danwei are no longer meaningful in people's lives. But hukou still is. I heard immigrant workers without local hukou can't send their children to public schools.

[roddy]

Depends on where you live and who you work for. In some cases the danwei can and will interfere - these are all second hand examples, but I've heard of people being told they can't marry someone from Taiwan, they can't get divorced, and they can't go to Hong Kong. Old-school work units - universities, SOEs, 事业单位, and 事业单位 that have turned into companies but still have a strong 官味 tend to be worse.Shanghai requires the danwei(s) (or a local committee) to confirm that the happy couple are single, and while that isn't explicit permission, it's worth noting that later on there's a sentence about what happens if the danwei or someone else 干涉s。

The hukou doesn't affect mobility as such - you can in theory go where you like, although you have to register - you see 流动人口管理处 (or some such) offices sometimes. But it does affect access to healthcare, education, social housing, and representation - no local hukou, no voting for the local people's representatives. I suspect the first three are the most upsetting though. It's also a major chunk of bureaucracy. Come from Jiangxi but working in Beijing? Guess where you need to go for a passport or replacement ID card.

Hukou's can be transferred, if the receiving locality wants you - I think Beijing will take people who studied in Beijing and have a sponsoring employer, people who've come back after studying overseas, that kind of thing. Good luck converting an agricutural hukou to an urban one though.

Dang'ans I've never really heard much about - I think they're more a bureaucratic hassle to get transferred about than anything else.

[Xiwang]

Here's a story from last year about people losing their future careers because of stolen dangans.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/world/asia/27china.html

[abcdefg]

Dang'ans I've never really heard much about - I think they're more a bureaucratic hassle to get transferred about than anything else.

They featured prominently in one of my favorite TV dramas from last year 《蓝色档案》。People were willing to die (and did) to retrieve their secret files from the authorities at the time of the three-way conflict between 共产党、国民党、and 日本 forces.

[vexed]

Thanks for the replies - some interesting information here.

It seems as if the Iron Triangle is less of a burden these days but still holds some weight. I wonder, how it affects foreigners in China? I believe that a foreigner living in China has to get a hukou, how about the other two?

[abcdefg]

I'm not sure if foreigners living here need to get a hukou.

Edited March 14, 2010 at 11:39 AM by abcdefg

[gerri]

You can't get a hukou as a foreigner. You can't even get a hukou (easily, totally legally, without paying up) if you are born to one Chinese parent and one foreign parent who is in country illegally (thinking of the recent reports on the troubles for children of Vietnamese brides to China), or an illegal second child...

I do wonder if the government keeps tabs on the foreigners somehow, meaning that there is a dang'an for us, but dunno.

The danwei plays something of a role, since you need your employer to get Z visa and residence permit, but it has lost quite a bit of its role. AFAIK it's not necessary to get a danwei's permission to get married anymore, for example.

The funniest I know about the meaning of the danwei is that the CSC scholarship application asks for your last danwei instead of most recent employer... I'm sure the school (in Europe) I had worked for before coming to China wouldn't often think of itself as a danwei

(And if you are into strange happenings about the rules, check what most websites tell you the rules for marriages between foreigners and Chinese citizens are. - By and large, the old rules are still up, though they have been changed a while ago...)

[wushijiao]

For a look at how the hukou system affects the education of the children of migrant workers, take a look at Tania Branigan's piece in the Guardian (with a good video):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/15/china-migrant-workers-children-education

[gato]

The Beijing Lawyer's Association, a government-organized group, recently issued rules that prohibited law students without Beijing hukou from obtaining traineeship in Beijing law firms. Traineeships are more or less required to becoming a practicing lawyer. This rule is likely to prevent many law students without Beijing hukou from working as lawyers in Beijing.

http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_51dd87c10100ga6m.html

没北京户口甭想在京当律师?京律协新规被指地域歧视

(2010-01-27 15:33:19)

有人认为涉嫌地域歧视，有人认为是对北京律师市场必要的宏观调控

　　一纸通知激起千层浪

但北京一家著名律师事务所的合伙人却认为，北京市律协此举也并非毫无根据。从现实看，是可行的。这位不愿透露姓名的律师对记者说:“北京律协的这个规定，结果就是一个——以后外地人来北京当实习律师是不可能了。但我们需要注意的事实是，北京的律师人数目前已经达到2.1万人，这样发展下去是不得了的，会给北京的律师市场带来巨大压力。你知道，任何市场的需求都是有限度的，当律师达到一定规模的时候，实际上市场已经饱和，这时候律师界内部就会互相‘残杀’ 了。北京市律协应该是基于要宏观调控北京律师市场不要过快无序增长的考虑而作出的这些修改规定。从目前实际情况看，北京需要高精尖的律师，很多没有北京户口的法科毕业生完全可以在外地实习并执业。”

[wushijiao]

Although, there were reports today about Beijing limiting classes to Beijing hukou residents (via Teng Biao's twitter)....

[eatfastnoodle]

huku is still meaningful document that could bring tangible benefit to you if you want to work in certain city, though nowadays, if you were "highly educated" professional, it's really not a big problem. Although lack of huku doesn't mean you can go to or work in any city, it just means that you can have some really annoying problems with settling down, having a family, having a kid, especially arranging a good school for you kid...

dangan has lost its grip long long time ago, maybe if you work for the government or the state-owned enterprise, it might still be of problem to you occasionally, but just like most of the bureaucratic stuff, you can figure out a get-around. (some of the paper work could be pretty ridiculous, when I was in China, at that time, fresh out of college, working for a major bank, I was once asked to fill out some paperwork that needs me to declare that I haven't committed any illegal acts in cultural revolution. For starters, I couldn't have done anything in cultural revolution because there was no me back then; secondly, how stupid do you think I am to tell you I committed crimes if I indeed committed some?)

BTW, I think my old dangan is probably stacked in a drawer at my parent's place, if it still exists.

Danwei is nothing nowadays, your superior in your danwei was once tasked with the unenviable job of mediating disputes between husband and wife. Nobody is that stupid now and few, if any, expect Danwei to do anything for them beside regular paycheck and benefit, especially if you work in the private industry. I think back in the 90s, there was a TV show about a Chinese guy falling in love with an American woman which led to him deciding to divorce his wife so that he could marry this American chick. Needlessly to say, his parents weren't so amused about the prospect of having a blonde daughter in law, and they actually went to the professor/superior/maybe even somebody from the embassy in the vein hope that the blonde's "danwei" would intervene to stop her from wrecking their son's family.....

[jbradfor]

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16058750

Rapid industrial growth over the past three decades has required tearing down migration barriers to exploit the countryside’s huge labour surplus. Hukou, however, still counts for a lot, from access to education, health care and housing to compensation payouts. To be classified as a peasant often means being treated as a second-class citizen. Officials in recent years have frequently talked about “reforming” the system. They have made it easier to acquire urban citizenship, in smaller cities at least. But since late last year the official rhetoric has become more urgent. Policymakers have begun to worry that the country’s massive stimulus spending in response to the global financial crisis could run out of steam. Hukou reform, they believe, could boost rural-urban migration and with it the consumer spending China needs.

In early March 11 Chinese newspapers (it would have been 13, had not two bottled out) defied party strictures and teamed together to publish an extraordinary joint editorial. It called on China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), which was then about to hold its annual meeting, to urge the government to scrap the hukou system as soon as possible. “We hope”, it said, “that a bad policy we have suffered for decades will end with our generation, and allow the next generation to truly enjoy the sacred rights of freedom, democracy and equality bestowed by the constitution.” Not since the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 had so many newspapers simultaneously cast aside the restraints imposed by the Communist Party’s mighty Propaganda Department, which micromanages China’s media output.

I know much of the Hukou system was removed; I didn't realize so much still existed.

[roddy]

Merging - for a new topic we'd generally like to see more than a large quote and a one-line comment.

[jbradfor]

Fair enough. I looked for a similar topic to add it to, but didn't find this one.

Later edit: Roddy, want to add a subtitle to this thread, such as "hukou, dangan, and danwei", for search-impaired people such as me?

[jbradfor]

(some of the paper work could be pretty ridiculous, when I was in China, at that time, fresh out of college, working for a major bank, I was once asked to fill out some paperwork that needs me to declare that I haven't committed any illegal acts in cultural revolution. For starters, I couldn't have done anything in cultural revolution because there was no me back then; secondly, how stupid do you think I am to tell you I committed crimes if I indeed committed some?)

No more stupid than when I was applying for a (USA) government job, they asked me if I had every used illegal drugs. Easy answer as I hadn't. But who would say yes?

I think they reason they ask is because that way if they find you had (used drugs or committed any illegal acts in the cultural revolution), they can fire you for the mere fact that you lied on your application, rather than having to prove any serious misconduct.

[chrix]

the US government has revoked citizenship in several cases where people involved in the Holocaust had lied about their involvement when coming to the US, and subsequently deported them to Germany and other countries to stand trial there.

Nowadays they don't just ask about the Holocaust, but about any genocide.