#hukou

上海之夜 / Shanghai Blues Tsui Hark. 1984

Street Hukoulao St, Hukou Township, Hsinchu County, Taiwan 303 See in map

I'd really hope for someone who understands hukou to chime in, because either I got something extremely wrong, or Airplane's background has much much more angst than we talk about in fandom.

Tldr: if I understand correctly, his parents both leaving him to start new families wasn't about social or emotional abandonment, it was about putting him in a legal and economical limbo akin to the situation of an undocumented immigrant.

...I kind of hope I got it wrong. I'm not even remotely fluent enough in Mandarin to check hukou registration details

But there's a chance these throwaway lines were meant to carry similar weight as a throwaway line with "cancer"+"credit score"+"hostel" would carry in USA context. Like, it's bad but you'd need local lore to understand how bad. Again: maybe I got it wrong

But, basically, hukou is an ID document but for a "this person belongs to this household" instead of "this person is citizen of this state/country" and tied to a household register, which in turn is tied to a particular housing property and a particular local administration.

If someone wants to send kids to better school in another city district, they buy an apartment in that district and re-register hukou. If someone wants to move from rural area to a city, they're in a legal limbo because they don't have a hukou of that particular city. Under One-Child Policy, which lasted until 2015, it wasn't just about fines, it was also about not being able to register "extra" children in your household, send them to public school, send them to public healthcare, access any social services.

Xiang Fei parents both unregistered him to "clear" their household register to be able to register their new children with new spouses.

And I'm unsure whether he was legally eligible to register as his own one-person household. The amount of pressure about buying and owning property in the city in stories about daily life in China implies that without property ownership it's either impossible or extremely difficult to register.

wfh2046

黄河之水天上来！壶口瀑布和彩虹🌈！

#壶口瀑布

Household registration systems in Taiwan and mainland China serve as foundational tools for governance, but they differ significantly in structure, purpose, and societal impact. Below I queried Chat GPT in Chinese to get an overview of and sources on the household registration/hukou system. See also the Wikipedia article 🇹🇼 Household Registration in Taiwan Overview: Taiwan’s household…