China’s discriminatory hukou system plagues white-collar workers, too

TWO CHINAS collided on a summer night in Beijing this year when “Little Zhang”, a high-flying young businessman, was summoned for questioning by an elderly neighbour at his housing complex, and asked to prove that he is a legal resident of the city. In the new China where Mr Zhang spends most of his days—a swaggering country rushing to become a high-tech superpower—the 31-year-old is a model citizen. He recently secured a job with a prestigious technology company, buoyed by a master’s degree from a Western university and a stint with a foreign consultancy. In an older China, a bossy place which issues old men and women with red armbands and tasks them to sit outside apartment blocks, snooping on all who pass, he is an object of suspicion.

Despite Mr Zhang’s enviable job, he is legally an outsider in his new home of Haidian, a district in Beijing’s north-west where technology firms have sprung up near elite universities. Born in the neighbouring province of Hebei, Mr Zhang belongs to a tribe of white-collar migrants who call themselves, with mock-defiant pride, Beipiao, or Beijing drifters. Its members are hard to spot, but know who they are. They are well-educated and hail from an urban area in another part of China. To build secure lives in the capital they must pull off something hard by changing their hukou, or household registration, to make Beijing their official home, or, failing that, by obtaining an employment-related residency permit. Mr Zhang’s interrogation was brief. He showed his national and company identity-cards to the “old granny” questioning him, and insisted that he was “definitely an honest citizen”, merely prevented by red tape from obtaining the right documents. Hurry up and get those papers, she commanded. He did not demur, having heard the same demand from local police not long before.