Thanks for clarifying. Hukou itself is indeed very bad. There's a few subtle details which made it not feel like a (traditional) class system to me. tl;dr it's

Thanks for clarifying. Hukou itself is indeed very bad. There's a few subtle details which made it not feel like a (traditional) class system to me. tl;dr it's no longer a urban/rural class system, it's more of a born-in-Beijing/Shanghai vs others class system. AFAIK, the urban/rural differentiating part (农业户口; "agricultural hukou" vs urban hukou) is no longer relevant. The "you can't have social welfare where you want to live/work; you can only have social welfare where your hukou is at" part is still relevant and unlikely to be changed in the near future. Thanks to capitalism, what type of hukou you have no longer limits what kind of work you can do. Most of the mingong-s do low-paid migrant labor work because on the market that's the best they can do with their skills. I have talked with a software engineer at Tencent who was claiming to have rural hukou. This is generally true, to the point that rural hukou holders no longer want to convert their hukou to the urban one, from [1]: > A recent study [2] finds that only one-fifth migrant workers are interested in converting their rural hukou to urban hukou, as they are unwilling to give up their rural land – valuations having increased sharply in recent years. It is still unfair to them because of the welfare thing mentioned above, though. But it is not because of the urban/rural difference: for example, if someone has a urban hukou in, say, Zhengzhou (a city with 12mln people), they still can't have welfare in Beijing even if they lived in Beijing for 10+ years. Which is also why they don't convert to urban hukou unless it's Beijing/Shanghai one - benefits of poorer cities are meh, and it is not possible to convert back so they lose their lands permanently. [1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-hukou-system/ https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-hukou-system/ [2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Rural-Chinese-in-no-hurry-to-settle-in-cities-after-all https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Rural-Chinese-in-no-hurry-to...