Chinese Apartheid and the Fragile Communist State

The forced encampment by the Chinese Communist Party of nearly 2 million members of minority groups in China’s western Xinjiang province is perhaps the largest coerced collectivization of humanity since the Soviet Union disbanded its Gulag prison system. Torture, forced sterilization, and forced labor are the hallmarks. The world has taken notice: Global companies and foreign leaders are raising concerns, and there is a burgeoning movement to boycott next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing.

But while the world recognizes the undeniable scale of this tragedy, it is not paying much attention to another method of 20th-century totalitarian domination that the CCP is emulating. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has institutionalized discrimination by an elite, relatively wealthy minority against the rest of the population on a scale and with a degree of deliberation unseen since the apartheid-era in South Africa.

China’s apartheid system is based on the longstanding practice of hukou, a ruthless permanent caste system maintained with vigor by the party. Hukou has in common with South African apartheid decades of social and economic domination by an entrenched minority — in this case, the urban political and economic class of the Chinese Communist Party — over the majority population. South African apartheid allowed generations of white Afrikaner leaders in government and business to maintain both economic and social control over the majority (black) population. Similarly, in China, the CCP depends on hukou to control the 900 million rural poor while relying on their cheap labor to keep so-called first-tier cities afloat. The urban elite and middle class in Beijing, Shanghai, and other tier-one cities accept the system without reservation or even much recognition, much as their South African counterparts did.

China’s apartheid relies on an internal-passport system that follows the bearer for his or her life. The system is straightforward: You are born urban or born rural, and you carry that with you until you die. This designation is enforced through an intricate system of quotas and restricted access to schools, jobs, health care, and the social safety net (such as one exists in the PRC).

The government uses the restrictions to control urban migration, throttling it to ensure sufficient labor for the fast-growing cities. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants to the cities form a permanent underclass, granted access to services — health care, education, unemployment stipends — only at the level available to their rural hukou status. In their book Invisible China, Stanford University scholar Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell write that the system has created two Chinas: the Republic of Urban China and the Republic of Rural China. While Rural China citizens can travel to Urban China, they write, “even if rural parents move from their villages to the big cities for work . . . they are not legally entitled to send their kids to urban public schools or to access urban public hospitals.” Since there is not enough access to urban jobs or services for the roughly two-thirds of China that has rural hukou status, migration to cities often splits rural families apart. Fathers or mothers or older sons may migrate to the city, leaving daughters and grandparents behind.

Chinese apartheid thus sustains the vast disparity in incomes between the cities and the countryside, where the World Bank estimates — and the CCP generally acknowledges — that hundreds of millions live on about $5 per day. While the wealth gap in the United States is decried by progressive politicians, it is no coincidence that a recent analysis of OECD data for 24/7 Wall Street and USA Today placed South Africa and China — the modern era’s premiere practitioners of apartheid — at No. 1 and No. 2 on the list of top 15 countries with the widest disparity between rich and poor. Both systems depend on systemic chauvinist policies by a prosperous advantaged minority against an impoverished majority. But what South Africa abandoned, China continues.