Reorganizing space: A critical bordering perspective on <i>hukou</i> reform

Since the pre-reform era, China’s hukou system has perpetuated a socio-spatial divide between rural and urban Chinese. In recent years, the hukou system has been reformed so that municipal governments have increased leeway so that hukou policy addresses local policy problems. Approaching this array of localized hukou strategies, this paper identifies two common manifestations of hukou policy: regimes which deploy hukou to accumulate rural land, epitomized by Chongqing and Chengdu; and regimes which use hukou to select highly skilled migrants, a common practice in wealthy “first-tier” cities. Employing a critical bordering perspective, the paper attends to the motivations for and repercussions of these two common manifestations or “bordering-scapes,” and underlines the ambiguous impact that hukou reform has had on China’s rural-urban inequality.