by Rob Schmitz
This scheme backfired when rural government officials—under pressure from the central government to raise agricultural output—wildly exaggerated their crop numbers. When state tax collectors came around, many rural communities like Zhao’s were forced to give up all their food to meet what was promised. From 1958 to 1962, it is estimated that 36 million rural Chinese starved to death while their urban hukou-holding compatriots—factory workers along the Street of Eternal Happiness included—dined on the food they had grown, oblivious to the body count in China’s countryside.
Yet from an economic perspective, the hukou system sped up the country’s industrialization. One hukou expert called it “China’s secret recipe for its unprecedented economic success.” But a report written on the fiftieth anniversary of the modern hukou system laid out the brutal cost to Chinese society:
By immobilizing the peasantry, forcing them to tend the land at mostly subsistence levels of compensation, and excluding them from access to social welfare and ability to move to cities, this approach created two very different societies. And given the immutable, hereditary nature of the hukou classifications, the peasantry de facto became an underclass.
After the Reform and Opening era of the 1980s, China’s government removed the hukou checkpoints and gradually allowed its citizens more freedom of movement, restoring a right that had originally been guaranteed in the country’s constitution, but ignored by law enforcement.
Despite the change, the impact on Chinese society remained. By 2000, the hukou system had created two Chinas: one like Shanghai, filled with gleaming skyscrapers and modern public transportation that drew migrant workers from undeveloped areas and tourists from abroad; and the other China, which looked like Zhao’s hometown: an impoverished, luohou countryside, where hundreds of millions still eked out livings as farmers on less than $2.00 a day. That other China was a place that visitors didn’t care to go, and that most Chinese were eager to leave.
Once they did, though, they learned a rural hukou was worthless in a city like Shanghai. Rural Chinese like Zhao had to journey back to their hukou’s origin if they wanted a marriage license, a passport, or health insurance.
The biggest complaint I heard from non-native Shanghainese along the street was the system’s impact on their children. Tens of millions of children were born to couples that had moved to the cities to find work. Like Big Sun, these kids grew up in the city, went to primary school in the city, made friends in the city, and considered the city their hometown. Yet their hukou belonged to the countryside. So when it came time for high school, they were forced to move back to the town of their parents’ birth. If they weren’t left-behind children by then, odds are when they were sent to the countryside to live with their grandparents in a town they had visited only a handful of times, they would become textbook examples by the time high school was through. Social scientists wrote condemning stories about this aspect of the hukou system, often comparing it to the apartheid system in South Africa before Mandela came to power.
Doing away with hukou wouldn’t be easy for the government. It had helped leaders gain control over the economic output of its 1.3 billion citizens, aiding in China’s rise to become the world’s second-largest economy by 2011. This restriction on the flow of migrant workers’ families had also helped prevent the emergence of shantytown suburbs commonplace in the cities of other developing countries, like India or Brazil. It wasn’t uncommon even for migrant workers to acknowledge the dangers of dismantling the system. A factory worker from Anhui once told me, “Without the hukou system, there’d be a flood of outsiders into Shanghai, and many of them wouldn’t be able to find a job. Pretty soon there’d be poor people everywhere, their kids all over the streets. Can you imagine how much crime we’d have?”
These were all valid points I had heard from government officials whenever they defended the system—arguments Western media usually ignored. When you considered that China was a developing country with more than a billion people and a rapidly widening wealth gap, it was astonishing how safe its biggest cities were. The harmless streets of Shanghai were one of the biggest draws of moving back to China with my family. Here was a city of 25 million people where we could take a neighborhood stroll at night without worrying about being harassed or mugged. Doing the same thing in our former home along the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles could sometimes draw out our survival instincts.
In addition to preventing the shantytown effect, China had forced more than 250 million people to retain connections with their rural hometowns, and this, too, had a long-term positive impact. As China’s economy sped along with double-digit growth, workers who flocked to the cities as young men and women were now making enough money to return home to their children, buy a house, and apply the skills they’d acquired in the cities to help build the economies of their rural hometowns.
In 2013, I returned to the town in Sichuan where I’d lived fifteen years earlier, and I marveled at the changes there. My former Chinese colleagues used to live in Stalinist cement-block hovels with chickens roaming around their courtyards, but now they inhabited luxury condominium complexes and owned cars for weekend family road trips. The region’s economy was also flourishing thanks in no small part to the money and skills sent home through a network of migrant workers: trickle-down economics with Chinese characteristics.
In the minds of China’s economic planners, the hukou system may have treated hundreds of millions of people like illegal immigrants in their own country, but, like the one-child policy, it was a necessary evil if the country was to raise the standard of living for its 1.3 billion residents.
IN 2002, Zhao’s oldest had gone as far as he could in Shanghai with a Zaozhuang hukou. Big Sun moved back to the Zaozhuang mining bureau to start the tenth grade. His father was working double-time at the coal mine, so they rarely saw each other. China had just entered the WTO, and the Olympic committee had selected Beijing to host the upcoming 2008 summer games. A record amount of coal would be needed to fuel China’s growing economy—an average of one coal-fired power plant would be built each week to maintain the country’s growth. With his father at the mine and his brother away at a special education school, Big Sun tried to fend off loneliness by focusing on his studies, something he excelled at in Shanghai. He’d outshone his Shanghai classmates, and he figured high school in a luohou place like Zaozhuang would be a cinch.
“I’ll be one of the top students in my class,” Big Sun guessed.
But on his first day of school, he panicked. His new classmates were years ahead of him. He showed his instructor a physics textbook from Shanghai.
“My teacher paged through the book, started to laugh, pointed to the worst student in class, and said, ‘You could be first in class if you moved to Shanghai!’ The rest of the students laughed out loud.”
Big Sun suddenly wished he could transport himself back to his mother’s shop on the Street of Eternal Happiness. As his first day of school crawled by, he realized rural students used textbooks tailored to prepare them for a college entrance exam that was far more challenging than the one given in China’s biggest cities. The exam was designed to be harder because there were simply more students to filter out. Shandong province has nearly 100 million people, his teacher explained. “He’d said, ‘Among a sea of people, the test needs to sift through the sand to find the elite.’ ”
Big Sun came to understand he was an insignificant grain of sand. His new classmates worked harder than he did, and the school day in Zaozhuang was twice as long as the one in Shanghai, with students arriving at 7 a.m. and sticking around for evening study sessions until 9 p.m.
“All that extra time was devoted to memorizing textbooks—students wouldn’t even rest during break time,” Big Sun told me. Shanghai students could sometimes consult books during exams, but hometown kids had to rely only on their memories, he said.
Memorizing textbooks was the natural outcome of an education system that culminated with a single college
entrance exam known as the gaokao. In a culture that emphasized connections to get ahead, the gaokao was the great equalizer: anyone, no matter his or her background, could, if they studied hard enough, do well on the test and take control of their family’s destiny. Because of its ability to transform the fate of an entire bloodline, though, the gaokao has meant that Chinese students spend much of their time studying for and taking tests.
With his new classmates a few years ahead in their memorization, Big Sun was drowning. He began failing exams. He lost interest in school. He started playing videogames at Internet bars instead of attending evening study sessions. Good students didn’t talk to him anymore, and he slept through class. His high school teacher thought the sixteen-year-old should re-enroll as a seventh grader and repeat middle school.
“I’d have been close to thirty years old by the time I could graduate from college. It would’ve had a huge impact on the rest of my life,” Big Sun said.
The alternative was more attractive: he dropped out.
Big Sun would return to Shanghai not as a decorated student, but as a migrant worker, just like his mother had twenty years earlier.
FEBRUARY MARKS THE BEGINNING of the busy season for flower vendors in China with the one-two punch of the Lunar New Year—China’s most celebrated holiday—and Valentine’s Day. Roses are in high demand.
It was 2012. Zhao had barely recovered from the Year of the Dragon celebration, ushered in with an all-night blitzkrieg of fireworks. Her shop floor was a mess of ribbon, tissue, and banners, surrounded by shelves of red, pink, and white roses to be sold for the forthcoming holiday.
She looked tired. She was up most of the night taking care of her new grandchild, who had been born two months ago when it was still the Year of the Rabbit. The chubby boy was the son of Little Sun, now living with Zhao. When Big Sun dropped out and returned to Shanghai, Little Sun saw his chance to finally escape the County school for autistic children and tagged along on Big Brother’s trip to the big city.
Both moved in with their mother. Little Sun was twenty-four. Folks in his hometown had heard about where he attended school, and at first, few families offered up their daughters in marriage. It reminded Zhao of her bout with leukemia years ago and the stigma it earned her. But now she had a trump card: the money she had made in the big city, which was also well-shared gossip back in the coal town.
Everyone knew about the two apartments she’d purchased near the high-speed rail station in the county seat. The same local women who had refused to speak to Zhao when she first left for her factory job fifteen years ago were now vying for her attention. It was decided that marrying a son of Zhao was a ticket out of the countryside, and Zhao selected Zhang Min, the confident young daughter of farmers, to be Little Sun’s bride.
“Valentine’s Day is exhausting,” Zhao said as she wrapped a bouquet of roses, “but it always makes me happy to know the flowers I’ve arranged will be given by young people as a token of love.”
Zhao bound the stems tightly together—an order of fifty-seven roses that would be picked up the next day—and a smile emerged as she thought about this. It was just above freezing outside, and her door was opened a crack to let the chilly, humid air inside to prolong the lives of her slowly dying merchandise. It was late afternoon, and the smog had turned the setting sun into a reddish-orange ball suspended just above the bare branches of the plane trees lining the Street of Eternal Happiness. The faint, intermittent car horns of rush hour began to honk, the soundtrack to the end of the workday in Shanghai.
Big Sun was away, working at a golf course. After spending several years playing videogames and subsisting on an allowance from Zhao, he had pulled himself together and found a job. “He thinks golf will be big in China, so he’s learning how to play—he wants to be a golf coach someday,” Zhao told me. “The other day he said, ‘Mom, I can hit a ball from here to the Yan’an expressway!’ ”
Shanghai’s busiest thoroughfare was visible from Zhao’s shop 200 yards to the north.
Zhao looked relieved. The past few years had been tough for Big Sun. His classmates from his Shanghai middle school had graduated from the country’s best universities. That should’ve been him, Zhao told me, and it killed her to think about that.
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve ruined my son,” Zhao said, putting the roses aside for a moment. “I always told him to be a good worker, to work hard for the country. But look what’s happened to him.”
Just the other day, Zhao said, a couple from Fujian arrived in the big city and had their eyes on renting a storefront across the street. They wanted to bring their child here.
“I told them, ‘Go back to Fujian! We were fooled.’ ”
Zhao had given the same advice to all her friends from the countryside. “I tell them if they come, they’ll ruin their kids’ lives.”
This seemed melodramatic to me, and I said so. She had done well in Shanghai and people back home envied her success. Her sons may not have attended perfect schools, but they were working hard, just like she did when she came to the big city.
“Is Big Sun’s life really ruined?” I asked her.
Zhao let the question hang in the cold fragrant air of the shop.
“We are all Chinese,” Zhao said, motioning to the people walking along the sidewalk. “We are under the same leadership, and we are part of the same country. Why aren’t we allowed to have the same rights?”
She had come with a dream and worked hard to achieve it, only to watch the fruits of this labor spoil because she didn’t have the correct household registration. Still, Zhao enjoyed other rights her ancestors hadn’t. She had freely left her hometown. She had worked hard and earned more money than anyone in her family. Her boys may not have received a Shanghai education, but they would enjoy the material benefits of their mother’s decisions for years to come.
Zhao sat on the stool beside me and released a big sigh, exhaled with a cloud of vapor that slowly dissipated inside the freezing shop.
“After my husband retires and I find a wife for Big Sun, I need to rest. I’ve been here in this tiny room for fifteen years. I’ve never traveled or even gone out to eat. Sometimes I wonder if there will ever be a day when I start to live for myself.”
It’s a question often pondered by Chinese mothers, and the answer is almost always: no. Tradition requires them to take care of their husbands, their parents, their children, and their grandchildren. Living for yourself is considered selfish.
But Zhao had done away with tradition. She had left her husband behind. She had started her own business and made her own money. She had seized control of her life. Now she felt responsible for her children and she worried about them incessantly—and she’d feel the same anxiety for their children, too.
“After my eldest son gets married, I’ll have to take care of his child, right?” she asked. “Chinese people just can’t let things go. We always live for others, for the next generation. It’s endless. Aren’t we stupid?”
There were several unanswered questions at the Jin Le Flower Shop this afternoon. That one went unanswered, too.
Zhao’s telephone rang. “Wei? Hello? Big Sun!” Her face immediately reverted to her usual beaming smile. Her son was calling to tell her about his day.
I stepped outside to give her some privacy. The sun had set over Shanghai, the lights of office buildings shining brightly above me through the bare branches of the plane trees. The repairman next door tinkered with a scooter underneath a streetlamp, and his wife was inside the shop serving noodles to their little boy.
Above the din of traffic along the street, I heard Zhao laughing, listening to her son recount his day. She was happy again.
Morning on the Street of Eternal Happiness begins earlier than it does in much of the rest of China. The first signs of life are minivans stocked with fresh fish that pull into the neighborhood wet market near the street’s midpoint at four in the morning. Then come the stacked boxes of fruits and vegetables, strappe
d to scooters with a tangle of bungee cords, their drivers racing down the dark, empty street. At five o’clock, vendors set up their wares, tossing yesterday’s rotten produce onto the sidewalks. Minutes later, garbage trucks full of street cleaners dressed in pale blue jumpsuits arrive and pick up the mess. Then comes the street-cleaning machine, an enormous water tank on wheels that glides slowly over the pavement like a Zamboni, speakers on top of it blasting an eerie electronic version of “It’s a Small World.”
On this brisk November morning in 2013, the sun peeks over Shanghai’s horizon at nine minutes after six o’clock. Three thousand miles west in Kashgar, a former Silk Road trading town in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, the sky is still pitch black, sprinkled with stars. If China adhered to more than one time zone, it would now be three in the morning in Kashgar. But it’s not. It’s 6 a.m. there too, and the sun won’t come up for another three and a half hours. The city is as far away from Shanghai as Los Angeles is from New York, but clocks on the city squares, train stations, and high school classrooms in the two cities display the same time.
No matter where you are in China, it’s Beijing Time.
It’s going to be a sunny autumn day in Shanghai. The high temperature will hover around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s currently 40 degrees with an occasional breeze pushing smog eastward into the city from the manufacturing empire of the Yangtze Delta. The plane trees’ foliage is a spattering of green trending yellow, and when a strong wind blows down the street, banana-colored leaves break free from their branches, gently falling onto the honking cars and scooters of the morning traffic below. I check the air quality index on my phone, and it reads an orange-colored UNHEALTHY.
I’ve spent the morning visiting with Zhao Shiling at her flower shop. On my way home along the Street of Eternal Happiness, I spot steam rising from an open window just above the sidewalk, obscuring the faces of the people who pass me with their hands stuffed in their pockets, rushing to work.