The story is a few months old but it involves a premise a recent book expounds on, "The Chinese Economic Miracle" is more related to having something that might be even said to be a bit like slave labor.
Hukous: Being Illegal in One’s Own Country
What does a Beijing businesswoman born in China’s northeast Jinan Province have in common with Shanghai taxi drivers from rural Anhui, Henan, and Chongqing?
The answer is that they all spent time as “illegal immigrants†in their own country.
And only one of them has been able to somewhat solve that problem.
Read more at: https://thediplomat.com/2019/11/hukous-being-illegal-in-ones-own-country/
The Diplomat, above is from Asia, so that is where their scope of reporting is. There is some sort of similarly titled website out there as well.
Illegal immigrants in their own country: China’s migrant workers
By Michael Hill
Last year, eight-year-old Wang Fuman went viral in China. Covered in ice after walking an hour and a half to school, he featured in government media as a testament to the determination of the poorer Chinese to secure a good education. But he also shows the effects of the government’s Household Registration System (Hukou) that separates urbanities from rural China.
Before his fame, his father was a migrant worker whom he saw twice a year. Neither his home nor his school had central heating. He spent his time outside the classroom tending his grandmother’s farm and subsisted on a diet of boiled potatoes. He was one of the hundreds of millions of losers in the Hukou lottery.
The system originally controlled the movement of Chinese people, with changing registration from one place to another almost impossible. In times of famine, being registered to a rural area could be a death sentence.
Read more at: https://www.citymetric.com/politics/illegal-immigrants-their-own-country-china-s-migrant-workers-3985
