'Hukou's history over the past 50 years is therefore also an epic history of the peasantry's sacrifice in support of China's industrialization, a burden borne in different ways during different eras. The chronicle begins with the fruits of their labor (i.e., farm produce) being extracted cheaply from 1953 to the 1980s. Then peasants' physical labor (human bodies) was directly exploited. The milking process subsequently continued, culminating in the expropriation of their land (prevalent from the early 1990s onward). If Karl Marx once remarked that the history of capitalism is a history of exploitation and suffering of the industrial proletariat (who were newly “freed” peasants from land), it may be reasoned that the history of post-1949 industrialization in China has been one of exploitation and sacrifice of the peasantry. This practice has an ironic twist, inasmuch as the peasantry formed the Chinese Communist Party's pre-revolution political base, but is perhaps not unexpected given the inherently meager concern accorded peasantries in the communist doctrines penned by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin (Bideleux, 1985), the de facto exploitation of the countryside incorporated within the Soviet development model (e.g., Dziewanowski, 1979, pp. 195–197), and more broadly, the strong urban bias in most modern development ideologies (Lipton, 1977).
Over the last 50 years, the hukou system served the state well by helping it achieve the goal of making China a major industrial power, first through Mao's forced industrialization program and second through the post-Mao “world-factory” strategy. The latter yielded an unprecedented economic boom that is the envy of the world, but also reinforced the immense and perverse rural-urban socioeconomic chasm created by Mao and sustained serious and protracted social and spatial stratification. Ironically, the hukou system, with its attendant social discrimination and exclusion, is now a major obstacle in China's path to becoming a modern, first-world nation and global leader.'
Kam Wing Chan
