'Hukou,' the invisible border that follows China's internal migrants

Lei, a slight 37-year-old woman, sits on a ledge looking at her phone. She appears to be carrying everything she owns; a suitcase, bags and other bundles are piled at her feet. It is Tuesday, July 7, late in the afternoon, in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province in central China. Lei is wearing the red uniform of the hot pot restaurant where she had been working until a short time earlier. She quit before finishing the probationary period because she could not tolerate the “terrible conditions” or the endless schedule, “from 9.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m., with only an hour and a half break,” she says. “I worked two days and ended up exhausted. They won’t pay me anything, I worked for free. Never eat there,” she adds.

Originally from Jiangxi province in the south of the country, Lei arrived in Zhengzhou in June to work at the factory the Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn operates in the city. The vast manufacturing complex is the world’s main iPhone assembly hub and a key link in Apple’s production chain. Its assembly lines need labor timed to Apple’s launch calendar and, before a new model release, bring in tens of thousands of temporary workers, like an industrial harvest where, instead of picking grapes, smartphones are assembled. China Labor Watch (a U.S.-based organization) estimates that during the iPhone 17 production months in 2025 the workforce numbered around 200,000 employees.

“I couldn’t adapt to the night shift; I hadn’t worked nights for eight years,” Lei says of her brief time at Foxconn. She earned about 1,000 yuan (around $150) from that experience. She is now looking for new work, perhaps in Zhengzhou or elsewhere. Since she was 16 she has been eking out a living by moving between different sectors and provinces across China. She has worked in Hubei (central), Jiangsu (east) and Guangdong (south), in construction, electronics, and hospitality.

Her trajectory is not exceptional. Factories like Foxconn’s are fed by workers who come from other cities and provinces, stay for weeks or months, and move on when their contracts end or they find better opportunities. That mobility has been one of the engines of the country’s industrial development, but paradoxically it also exposes a major contradiction: those who sustain a city’s economic activity do not always have access to the same public services as the local population.

Lei is one of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who live away from the place where their hukou — residence registration — is recorded, which normally remains linked to the household’s registered locality. Transferring it to where one actually lives or works requires meeting very strict requirements, especially in metropolises such as Beijing or Shanghai: years of stable employment, social security and tax contributions, passing a points system or qualifying under routes reserved for skilled professionals, entrepreneurs, or family members of residents.

Introduced in 1958, the system was originally a tool to limit rural-to-urban migration and sustain the functioning of the planned economy. But as times changed and the coastal zones industrialized, demand for labor surged in the early 1980s and the model began to reveal its limits. The system has been gradually relaxed since then, though unevenly, depending on a city’s size and economic capacity.

Now, in a context of structural changes to the economy and labor market, adapting the system has become urgent for Beijing. In May, the State Council issued guidelines stating that basic public services “should be provided according to people’s place of habitual residence, not where their hukou is registered.”

The measure does not abolish the hukou but rather progressively changes the criteria used to allocate resources. “The main advance is broadening the basic scope of urban governance and public services to all residents,” the Tianhe Economic Research Institute in Beijing said. It added that in the future “a city’s governance capacity should also be assessed by its ability to receive and integrate newcomers.”

According to the most recent census data, almost 358 million people out of the 1.4 billion living in the country reside in a place different from that reflected on their hukou. The so-called “floating population” is a broader category than rural migrant workers and includes students, transferred employees and their family members. Digital platforms have recently expanded temporary, flexible, and freelance work, further increasing mobility.

The new guidelines aim to adapt public services to that reality and cover six areas: education, housing, social security, healthcare, employment, and care services. They propose increasing public school places for migrant children; access to subsidized rental housing; removing barriers to making social security contributions; facilitating health coverage and reimbursements across regions; and gradually incorporating non-local hukou residents into employment services, elderly persons care, child support, and social assistance.

Lei knows well the cost of not having a big-city hukou. Her 14-year-old daughter lives in her home province, hundreds of miles away, because only there can she attend public school. Lei sees her daughter once a year, although she says the teenager would prefer to be with her. “But I don’t want her to suffer with me until I find a stable job,” she says. Lei has always paid privately for her and her daughter’s health insurance, as well as their social security contributions, “to have some backup,” she says.

Although internal migration in China is often associated with large inter-provincial moves, most rural workers do not even leave their home province. Still, when they move to a city, many do not enjoy the same benefits they would in their place of origin. That is the case of 60-year-old Mr. Zhu. Almost every morning he rides his motorbike to Dongjiancai, a large building materials market in eastern Zhengzhou. He parks and hangs a sign on the front of his vehicle listing his services: from installing a false ceiling or replacing a window to acting as a plumber or electrician. On July 8 he was waiting for customers alongside other men who, like him, advertise their skills on the street. About 500 meters away, another group was doing the same thing.

Zhu is from the province and has been settled in Zhengzhou for more than 20 years, where he has worked in factories and warehouses and now fixes “anything.” But he describes himself as an “outsider.” His wife lives in the countryside; his son is in Shandong in the east of the country. “We have the family home in the village. In Zhengzhou I can’t buy [property],” Zhu says, though he concedes that in recent years the provincial capital “has improved services and is taking in more” people like him.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2025 China had 180 million rural migrant workers employed outside their place of origin (0.8% more than in 2024). Of those, 112 million moved to another municipality within their province (1.9% more than the previous year), while nearly 68 million migrated to another region (1.1% fewer than in 2024).

Henan, China’s third-most-populous province, has traditionally sent labor to the country’s industrial east and south. But Zhengzhou, with 13 million inhabitants and one of the country’s main rail and logistics hubs, has become a magnet for regional workers. One of the major drivers of that attraction is Foxconn.

“We’re super tired, we work 10 hours a day,” says a woman in her twenties who preferred not to be identified as she finished her shift at the factory at about 6.00 p.m. It was her first day and the second day for the two other young women with her. They are from Zhoukou, 120 miles away. They came attracted by “a good hourly wage” (25 yuan, $3.68) and plan to stay “a couple of months to save.” She already has a job lined up for September as a preschool teacher.

“Foxconn has brought enormous changes,” says a roughly 60-year-old sanlunche (motorized tricycle) driver stationed near one of the factory halls. She says she grew up where the airport now stands, in an area that later became part of the city’s large airport economic zone, where Foxconn set up in 2010: “We had to leave. They gave us financial compensation and a new house,” she recalls. She says, however, that she is “delighted” with the transformation: “There are more people, business is better.”

As dusk falls and a tide of workers streams to and from the assembly lines, an improvised market appears. “A lot of outsiders arrive at this time of year,” says the owner of a sausage stall as she plays with her barely two-year-old son. Her husband holds the local hukou. “It’s better to live in the city when the child goes to school,” she says with a smile.

Not far away, in an apartment area, Li, 50, watches the comings and goings. He was born in Luoyang, about 85 miles from Zhengzhou, and emigrated to Guangzhou at 22. There he worked for more than two decades making jewelry and accessories; he learned Cantonese and became accustomed to a region where, he recalls, people ate and lived better than in the poorer Henan of his youth.

He married a local woman and bought a new home in 2004, which at the time allowed him to apply for a hukou transfer. But bureaucracy worked against him and the rules changed before he could complete the process. The couple’s son inherited the mother’s Cantonese hukou at birth, “more advantageous than mine,” Li insists. “After so many years working in Guangdong, I am still officially from Henan,” he sums up.

He has returned to be closer to his father, whose health has declined, but his wife and son remain in the south, nearly 900 miles away. Last year he worked three months at Foxconn and, after the Lunar New Year, decided to repeat the experience. He lives in one of the dormitories for workers, sharing a room with five other employees.

Some nights he works a couple of hours as a hired driver: when someone is unfit to drive their vehicle, Li arrives on a small folding electric bike, stows it in the trunk, and drives the client home in his car. “Sometimes I earn more from this job than from doing overtime at Foxconn,” he says as he waits for a booking.

The uncertainty around schooling, healthcare or pensions has traditionally led migrant families to save almost everything they earn. That is why Chinese authorities hope that greater protection will reduce that tendency and boost domestic consumption, a priority for Beijing as it seeks to make the economy less dependent on investment and exports. The State Council’s new hukou guidelines explicitly state that the reform is of “great importance” to “unlock the potential of domestic demand and build a new development model.”

But the change will require revising how resources are distributed, and the official text does not point to a major additional contribution from the central government. Analysts at Trivium China believe the bill will continue to fall largely on local governments that are heavily indebted and have deeply unequal economic capacities, which they say will keep substantial reform from moving forward.

Li believes that changing hukou to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen “is now even harder than before,” despite the “promises” he says he has “heard for some time.” He does not think the new measures alone will solve a migrant family’s life. “You have to see if you can afford it. Bringing your wife and children to a big city means paying for housing, feeding them and facing a cost of living that keeps rising. In the village, it is still possible to live with almost no expenses.”

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