What role does China’s hukou system play in housing insecurity and how is that counted in homelessness statistics?
Executive summary
China’s hukou (household registration) system shapes who qualifies for urban welfare, and that administrative boundary—more than sheer housing supply—drives much housing insecurity among rural-to-urban migrants [1] [2]. Official homelessness counts focus narrowly on visible, street-dwelling people registered as homeless by local authorities, a methodology that sidelines the far larger population living in precarious, overcrowded or informal accommodation because they lack proper urban hukou and therefore full access to services [3] [4].
1. How hukou allocates rights and produces invisible precarity
The hukou system ties citizens to a registered locality and historically determined access to housing, education, healthcare and subsidies, meaning rural hukou holders who move to cities often lack entitlement to urban welfare even while supplying vital labor to urban economies [1] [5]. Scholars and commentators describe this as a stratifying institution that functioned like a caste or gated access system—urban births enjoyed privileges while rural migrants faced exclusion—so migrants commonly end up in “urban villages,” employer dorms, basements or overcrowded informal settlements rather than fully integrated housing markets [3] [2] [6].
2. Why official homelessness statistics understate the problem
Government figures that report low homelessness rates—often citing only people literally sleeping rough or those registered by municipal relief stations—miss categories of housing insecurity that academics argue should be counted, such as those in substandard, temporary or non-permanent housing because of hukou-related barriers [3] [4]. Multiple researchers urge expanding definitions: when scholars include insecure or inadequate housing typical of millions of migrant workers, estimates of “homelessness” swell dramatically in some accounts—scholars have even posited near‑300‑million counts if such broader criteria are used—illustrating how measurement choices, not only living conditions, drive headline numbers [7] [8].
3. The state response, enforcement, and the illusion of 'no slums'
Public policy and local enforcement further shape visibility: urban management, social relief stations and repatriation practices have historically limited visible street homelessness, and the state emphasizes poverty alleviation programs and hukou reform steps to reduce exposure—efforts that produce official narratives of declining homelessness even as systemic inequalities persist [6] [9]. These state measures—relief stations, mandatory returns to hometowns, and targeted poverty programs—can reduce the presence of rough sleepers but do not necessarily resolve the structural insecurity facing migrants who remain in precarious housing without urban social protection [6] [9].
4. Reform, measurement dilemmas, and the policy implications
Recent hukou relaxations and pilot reforms aim to ease access to services for migrants in smaller cities and, according to newer studies, reforms can measurably increase rural households’ resilience and mobility, suggesting institutional change could reduce housing precarity over time [10]. Yet the policy puzzle remains: counting only visible homelessness produces one set of policy choices (shelters, repatriation), while counting precarious housing tied to hukou exclusion points to different remedies (hukou portability, social welfare expansion, affordable rental regulation), and the literature repeatedly warns that official statistics shaped by narrow definitions undercut recognition of the broader problem [11] [3].
5. Bottom line: hukou is both cause and accounting filter
The hukou system both creates a class of urban outsiders—deprived of full welfare entitlements and pushed into insecure housing—and filters who is counted as homeless by making visible rough sleeping rare and by anchoring official definitions to administrative categories rather than lived housing adequacy; therefore, debates about homelessness in China are partly debates about measurement and political responsibility as much as they are about concrete shelters or construction [1] [4] [7]. Where the research argues for broader definitions, policy choices would shift from episodic relief to structural reforms of hukou and social provision; where official counts remain narrow, the scale of precarious housing tied to internal migration will continue to be obscured [3] [10].