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A number of authors have use the words "apartheid" or "apartheid-like" in descriptions of various practices in the People's Republic of China.[1] The practices so described include China's hukou system of residency permits,[2] [3] [4] and the treatment of Tibetans[5], foreigners, and ethnic and religious minorities. [6] [7] [8]

Contents

[edit] Treatment of rural workers

For more details on this topic, see Hukou.

China's hukou system of residency permits, introduced in the 1950s, has effectively discriminated against China's 800 million rural peasants for decades, and has been described as "China's apartheid".[9][2][10][11][12]

In November 2005 Jiang Wenran, acting director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta, said this system has been "one of the most strictly enforced 'apartheid' social structures in modern world history." He stated "Urban dwellers enjoy a range of social, economic and cultural benefits while peasants, the majority of the Chinese population, are treated as second-class citizens."Commenting on reports that abolition was proposed in 11 (of 23) provinces, mainly along the developed eastern coast, he added that such measures were long overdue. The law has already been changed such that migrant workers no longer faced summary arrest, after a widely publicised incident in 2003, when a university-educated migrant died in Guangdong province. This particular scandal was exposed by a Beijing law lecturer, Mr Xu, who claims it spelt the end of the hukou system. He further believes that, at least in most smaller cities, the system had already been abandoned. Mr Xu continued: "Even in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, it has almost lost its function".[13]

The discrimination enforced by the hukou system became particularly onerous in the 1980s after hundreds of millions of migrant laborers were forced out of state corporations and co-operatives.[14] The system classifies workers as "urban" or "rural",[11][12] and attempts by workers classified as "rural" to move to urban centers were tightly controlled by the Chinese bureaucracy, which enforced its control by denying access to essential goods and services such as grain rations, housing, and health care,[11] and by regularly closing down migrant workers' private schools.[14] The hukuo system also enforced pass laws similar to those in South Africa,[15][6] with "rural" workers requiring six passes to work in provinces other than their own,[14] and periodic police raids which rounded up those without permits, placed them in detention centers, and deported them.[15] As in South Africa, the restrictions placed on the mobility of migrant workers were pervasive,[14] and transient workers were forced to live a precarious existence in company dormitories or shanty towns, and suffering abusive consequences.[6] Anita Chan argues that, like South Africa under apartheid, China's hukou system was primarily a means of regulating and exploiting cheap labor.[6]

David Whitehouse divides what he describes as "Chinese apartheid" into three distinct phases: The first phase occurred during the state capitalist phase of China's economy, from around 1953 to the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The second "neoliberal" phase lasted from 1978 to 2001, and the third lasted from 2001 to the present. During the first phase, the exploitation of rural labor, the passbook system, and in particular the non-portable rights associated with one's status, created what Whitehouse calls "an apartheid system". As with South Africa, the ruling party made some concessions to rural workers to make life in rural areas "survivable... if not easy or pleasant". During the second phase, as China transitioned from state capitalism to market capitalism, export-processing zones were created in city suburbs, where mostly female migrants worked under oppressive sweatshop conditions. The third phase was characterized by the weakening of the hukou controls; by 2004 the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture counted over 100 million people registered as "rural" working in cities.[16]

Au Loong-yu, Nan Shan, and Zhang Ping of the Committee for Asian Women argue this system oppresses women more severely than men,[17] and see seven distinct elements giving rise to what they describe as "[t]he regime of spatial and social apartheid" which keeps rural Chinese in their subordinate status:

  1. The repressive regime at the factory level;
  2. the paramilitary forces at local level;
  3. the ‘local protectionism’ of local governments;
  4. the fiercely pro-business and pro-government attitude of the local press;
  5. the fiercely pro-business and pro-government attitude of the branches of ACFTU;
  6. pro-government local courts; and
  7. the discriminatory hukou system.[3]

They agree that the gradual relaxation of some of the more repressive aspects of the hukou system since the mid-1990s has largely eliminated the spatial aspect of the apartheid; for example, workers can now buy one year permits to reside in cities, and since 2003 the police no longer jail and deport people who lack local hukou passes. However, they point out the still-hereditary nature of the hukou system, and state that the "substance of the social apartheid in general and the hukou system in particular remains intact." Migrant workers are permanently marked as outsiders and remain second-class citizens, and are denied access to good jobs or upward mobility, thus forcing their eventual return to their place of origin.[18]

Whitehouse sees the analogy to South Africa's apartheid system breaking down in two areas: First, under a system called xia fang, or "sending down", individuals or even entire factories of urban workers were sometimes re-classified as rural workers and sent to live in the countryside (at lower wages and benefits). By contrast, white workers in South Africa were never sent to work in Bantustans. Second, the ideology driving China's apartheid system was Maoism, not racism, as is South African apartheid.[16] Anita Chan agrees with Whitehouse on this point, noting that while the hukou system shares many of the characteristics of the South African apartheid system, including its underlying economic logic, the racial element is not present.[6]

The Chinese Ministry of Public Security justified these practices on the grounds that they assisted the police in tracking down criminals and maintaining public order, and provided demographic data for government planning and programs.[19]

[edit] Apartheid "pass system" in treatment of migrant workers

According to Peter Alexander, China's export-oriented growth has been based on the labor of poorly paid and treated migrant workers, using a pass system similar to the one used in South Africa's apartheid, in which massive abuses of human rights have been observed. [4]

An article in The Washington Times, reported in 2000 that although migrants laborers play an important part in spreading wealth in Chinese villages, they are treated "like second-class citizens by a system so discriminatory that it has been likened to apartheid." [20] Another author making similar comparison is Anita Chan, in which she furthers that China's household registration and temporary residence permit system has created a situation analogous to the passbook system in apartheid South Africa, which were designed to regulate the supply of cheap labor.[6]

The embassy of the China in South Africa, posted a letter to the editor of The Star dated February 22, 2007 , under the title Article on China presents racism rumours as fact, in which a reader stated that "It's pure incitement to proclaim 'Chinese apartheid' in reference to migrant labour being kept out of the cities." [21]

[edit] Treatment of Tibetans

The 14th and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (born 1935).
The 14th and current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (born 1935).

In 1991 the Dalai Lama alleged that Chinese settlers in Tibet were creating "Chinese Apartheid":

The new Chinese settlers have created an alternate society: a Chinese apartheid which, denying Tibetans equal social and economic status in our own land, threatens to finally overwhelm and absorb us.[5][22]

In a selection of speeches by the Dalia Lama published in India in 1998, he refers again to a "Chinese apartheid" which he believes denies Tibetans with equal social and economic status, and furthers the viewpoint that human rights are violated by discrimination against Tibetans under a policy of apartheid, which the Chinese call "segregation and assimilation"[23]

A report by the Heritage Foundation discussed some of the reasons for the use of this term:

If the matter of Tibet's sovereignty is murky, the question about the PRC's treatment of Tibetans is all too clear. After invading Tibet in 1950, the Chinese communists killed over one million Tibetans, destroyed over 6,000 monasteries, and turned Tibet's northeastern province, Amdo, into a gulag housing, by one estimate, up to ten million people. A quarter of a million Chinese troops remain stationed in Tibet. In addition, some 7.5 million Chinese have responded to Beijing's incentives to relocate to Tibet; they now outnumber the 6 million Tibetans. Through what has been termed Chinese apartheid, ethnic Tibetans now have a lower life expectancy, literacy rate, and per capita income than Chinese inhabitants of Tibet.[24]

In 2001 representatives of Tibet succeeded in gaining accreditation at a United Nations-sponsored meeting of non-governmental organizations. On August 29 Jampal Chosang, the head of the Tibetan coalition, stated that China had introduced "a new form of apartheid" in Tibet because "Tibetan culture, religion, and national identity are considered a threat" to China.[25] The Tibet Society of the UK has called on the British government to "condemn the apartheid regime in Tibet that treats Tibetans as a minority in their own land and which discriminates against them in the use of their language, in education, in the practice of their religion, and in employment opportunities."[26]

These tensions have spilled over into the tourist industry. According to Peter Neville-Hadley:

Hotels practice a form of apartheid. Han-run hotels overcharge foreigners and don't want your business. Equally perverse are Tibetan-run hotels with signage only in English, sending a clear message to Han would-be patrons.[27]

[edit] Treatment of foreigners

[edit] Africans

For decades African students in China have been treated with hostility and prejudice. Their complaints regarding their treatment were largely ignored until 1988-9, when "students rose up in protest against what they called 'Chinese apartheid'".[28] African officials, who had until then ignored the problem, took notice of the issue. The Organization of African Unity issued an official protest, and the organization's chairman, Mali's president Moussa Traoré, went on a fact-finding mission to China.[28] The issue was so severe that, according to a Guardian 1989 Third World Report titled "'Chinese apartheid' threatens links with Africa", "'Chinese apartheid', as the African students call it, could threaten Peking's entire relationship with the continent."[7]

[edit] Taiwanese

A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of The New York Times accused China of fostering an "apartheid" policy toward Taiwan.[29] Dr Tan Sun Chen, Taiwan's Minister of Foreign Affairs, asserts that China's obstruction in the international community has led to a "political apartheid" which "harms the human rights, interests, and dignity of Taiwan’s people.".[30]

[edit] Treatment of ethnic and religious minorities

 Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.


According to Mark C. Elliott, "The apartheid policy in China's Manchu cities seems to have been fairly effective for at least a century in Beijing, and longer in the provinces."[8]

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

  • Cheng, Lucie, Rossett, Arthur and Woo, Lucie, East Asian Law: Universal Norms and Local Cultures, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, ISBN 0-415-29735-4
  • Edwards, Catherine, China's Abuses Ignored for Profit, Insight on the News, Vol. 15, December 20, 1999.
  • Foot, Rosemary, Rights beyond Borders: The Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China, Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-198-29776-9
  • Jones, Carol A.G., Capitalism, Globalization and Rule of Law: An Alternative Trajectory of Legal Change in China, Social and Legal Studies, vol. 3 (1994) pp. 195-220
  • Klotz, Audie, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle against Apartheid, Cornell University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-801-43106-9
  • Knight, J. and Song, L., The Rural-Urban Divide: Economic Disparities and Interactions in China, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-198-29330-5
  • Wang, Fei-Ling, Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System, Stanford University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-804-75039-4
  • Zweig, David, Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era, M. E. Sharpe, 1997, ISBN 1-563-24838-7
  • The silent majority; China. (Life in a Chinese village), The Economist, April, 2005

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Solinger and Wang (China: reforms of the household registration system (hukou)", February 2005) comment that 'Some have compared it to the apartheid pass system in South Africa (Alexander and Chan, Anita 1 July 2004; HRIC 6 Nov. 2002, 4; Hou 4 Mar. 2002) because it restricts the movement of rural ThukouT holders by requiring them to obtain temporary permits to reside in cities[4] (Alexander and Chan, Anita 1 July 2004; Anh Sept. 2003, 29-30).' Alexander and Chan remark that their 2004 paper ("Does China have an apartheid pass system?") was 'inspired by Anita Chan’s contention (2001: 9) that "[China’s] permit system controls [migrant workers] in a similar way to the passbook system under apartheid." More recently, Gillian Hart (2002: 204) proposed that "[a] further constraint on labor organizing [in China] was a system akin to [apartheid] influx control.".'
  2. ^ a b Macleod, Calum. "China reviews `apartheid' for 900m peasants", The Independent, June 10, 2001.
  3. ^ a b Au Loong-yu, Nan Shan, Zhang Ping. Women Migrant Workers under the Chinese Social ApartheidPDF (2.01 MiB), Committee for Asian Women, May 2007, p. 20.
  4. ^ a b Alexander, Peter, Does China Have an Apartheid Pass System?, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.4 (2004)
    China's household registration system (HRS) maintains a rigid distinction between China's rural population, that is people who have a rural hukou (household registration), and urban residents, who have an urban hukou. Movement of rural people into the cities is restricted, and they require a permit to stay and work temporarily in any urban area. If caught without these permits, people with a rural hukou could be placed in a detention centre, fined, and deported back to their home village or home town (that is, 'endorsed out', to borrow a South African expression). Those with a rural hukou who obtain a temporary employment permit to work in an urban area are not entitled to the pensions, schooling, unemployment benefits, etc. enjoyed by those who have an urban hukou. There are, in short, some obvious and significant similarities between the two countries, but a closer examination is required before we can consider equating China's pass system with what operated in apartheid South Africa." [...]" The combination of these four factors may explain why China has developed a quasi-apartheid pass system. The fact that it has such a system underlines the reality that China's export-oriented economic growth has been built, in large measure, on the labour of poorly paid and appallingly treated migrant workers. In China today, as in apartheid South Africa, the pass system is associated with massive abuses of human rights, and its retention should be opposed."
  5. ^ a b "Profile: The Dalai Lama", BBC News, April 25, 2006.
  6. ^ a b c d e f "The permit system controls [migrant workers] in a similar way to the passbook system under apartheid. Most migrant workers live in crowded dormitories provided by the factories or in shanties. Their transient existence is precarious and exploitative. The discrimination against migrant workers in the Chinese case is not racial, but the control mechanisms set in place in the so-called free labor market to regulate the supply of cheap labor, the underlying economic logic of the system, and the abusive consequences suffered by the migrant workers, share many of the characteristics of the apartheid system." Chan, Anita. China's Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy, M.E. Sharpe, 2001, p. 9.
  7. ^ a b Snow, Phillip. "Third World Report: 'Chinese apartheid' threatens links with Africa", The Guardian, January 20, 1989.
  8. ^ a b Elliott, Mark C. The Manchu Way: The 8 Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China, Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 116.
  9. ^ "HIGHLIGHT: Discrimination against rural migrants is China's apartheid: Certainly, the discrimination against the country-born is China's form of apartheid. It is an offence against human rights on a much bigger scale than the treatment of the tiny handful of dissidents dogged enough to speak up against the state." "Country Cousins", The Economist, April 8, 2000.
  10. ^ "...China's apartheid-like system of residency permits." Yao, Shunli. "China's WTO Revolution", Project Syndicate, June, 2002.
  11. ^ a b c "As in South Africa under apartheid, households in China faced severe restrictions on mobility during the Mao period. The household registration system (hukou) system... specified where people could work and, in particular, classified workers as rural or urban workers. A worker seeking to move from rural agricultural employment to urban non-agricultural work would have to apply through the relevant bureaucracies, and the number of workers allowed to make such moves was tightly controlled. The enforcement of these controls was closely intertwined with state controls on essential goods and services. For instance, unauthorized workers could not qualify for grain rations, employer-provided housing, or health care." Wildasin, David E. "Factor mobility, risk, inequality, and redistribution" in David Pines, Efraim Sadka, Itzhak Zilcha, Topics in Public Economics: Theoretical and Applied Analysis, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 334.
  12. ^ a b "China's apartheid-like household registration system, introduced in the 1950s, still divides the population into two distinct groups, urban and rural." Chan, Anita & Senser, Robert A. "China's Troubled Workers", Foreign Affairs, March / April 1997.
  13. ^ Luard, Tim. "China rethinks peasant 'apartheid'", BBC News, November 10, 2005. Retrieved 5th Aug 2007.
  14. ^ a b c d "Chinese apartheid: Migrant labourers, numbering in hundreds of millions, who have been ejected from state concerns and co-operatives since the 1980s as China instituted "socialist capitalism", have to have six passes before they are allowed to work in provinces other than their own. In many cities, private schools for migrant labourers are routinely closed down to discourage migration." "From politics to health policies: why they're in trouble", The Star, February 6, 2007.
  15. ^ a b "The application of these regulations is reminiscent of apartheid South Africa's hated pass laws. Police carry out raids periodically to round up those tho do not possess a temporary residence permit. Those without papers are placed in detention centres and then removed from cities." Waddington, Jeremy. Globalization and Patterns of Labour Resistance, Routledge, 1999, p. 82.
  16. ^ a b Whitehouse, David. "Chinese workers and peasants in three phases of accumulation"PDF (73.5 KiB), Paper delivered at the Colloquium on Economy, Society and Nature, sponsored by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, March 2, 2006. Retrieved August 1, 2007.
  17. ^ "We further identify seven elements of the repressive regime at the national, municipal and local levels, and argue that the combined results of these elements have given rise to a kind of spatial and social apartheid which systematically discriminates against the rural population, with women being the most oppressed." Au Loong-yu, Nan Shan, Zhang Ping. Women Migrant Workers under the Chinese Social ApartheidPDF (2.01 MiB), Committee for Asian Women, May 2007, p. 1.
  18. ^ "Since the middle of 1990’s the hukou system has been gradually relaxed. First, rural residents were permitted to buy a temporary (usually one year) urban residential card, which allowed them to work legally. The fees for such permits gradually decreased to a fairly affordable level. Beginning from 1998, parents have been able to pass down their hukou either through the father’s or the mother’s line, hence the triple discrimination against rural women has been alleviated. In 2003, after the uproar surrounding the death of Sun Zhigang alarmed the authorities, the laws on jailing and repatriating ‘undocumented’ people (those failing to produce local hukou) were abolished. Thus the spatial aspect of the apartheid has now largely been eliminated. However, the substance of the social apartheid in general and the hukou system in particular remains intact. The permanent mark of being an outsider and second class citizen remains, and prevents migrant workers from achieving significant upward mobility in cities. Most decent jobs are still reserved for people who possess local hukou. Migrants can only get badly paid jobs. They still have no future in the cities, and may only work there for some years and then return to their home village." Au Loong-yu, Nan Shan, Zhang Ping. Women Migrant Workers under the Chinese Social ApartheidPDF (2.01 MiB), Committee for Asian Women, May 2007, p. 11.
  19. ^ "The hukou system has been criticized in some quarters and has been called 'the equivalent of and apartheid system between rural and urban residents' (China Labor Bulletin, February 25, 2002). However, the Ministry of Public Security has continued to justify the hukou system as an instrument for keeping public order (the ministry said it allowed the police to track down criminals more easily) and for providing demographic data for planning and program formulation." Laquian, Aprodicio A. Beyond Metropolis: The Planning and Governance of Asia's Mega-Urban Regions, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, pp. 320-321.
  20. ^ Macleod, Calum and Macleod, Lijia China's migrants bear brunt of bias, The Washington Times, July 14, 2000.
    "Sending up to 50 percent of their earnings home, migrants play an important role in spreading wealth down to the villages. Yet they are still treated like second-class citizens by a system so discriminatory that it has been likened to apartheid."
  21. ^ {{cite web |url=http://www.chinese-embassy.org.za/eng/zt/thirdeye/t299146.htm|publisher=Embassy of The People's Republic of China in the Republic of South Africa""
  22. ^ United States Congressional Serial Set, United States Government Printing Office, 1993, p. 110.
  23. ^ "The Political Philosophy of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama. Selected Speeches and Writings" . Tibetan Parliamentary and Policy Research Centre. < /br>"Tibet is being colonized by waves of Chinese immigrants. We are becoming a minority in our own country. The new Chinese settlers have created an alternate society: a Chinese apartheid which, denying Tibetans equal social and economic status in our own land, threatens to finally overwhelm and absorb us. The immediate result has been a round of unrest and reprisal." (pp.65) [...]"Human rights violations in Tibet are among the most serious in the world. Discrimination is practiced in Tibet under a policy of apartheid which the Chinese call "segregation and assimilation." (pp. 248)
  24. ^ Lasater, Martin L. & Conboy, Kenneth J. "Why the World Is Watching Beijing's Treatment of Tibet", Heritage Foundation, October 9, 1987.
  25. ^ Goble, Paul. "China: Analysis From Washington -- A Breakthrough For Tibet", World Tibet Network News, Canada Tibet Committee, August 31, 2001.
  26. ^ "What do we expect the United Kingdom to do?", Tibet Vigil UK, June 2002. Accessed June 25, 2006.
  27. ^ Neville-Hadley, Peter. Frommer's China, Frommers.com, 2003, p. 268.
  28. ^ a b Robinson, Thomas W. & Shambaugh, David L. Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice, Oxford University Press, p. 315.
  29. ^ Rosenthal, A.M. "China's 'Apartheid' Taiwan Policy." The New York Times, December 4, 1995.
  30. ^ Sun Chen, Tan. Joining the Global Village: Taiwan's Participation in the International Community. Republic of China (Taiwan). Accessed August 5, 2007.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

[[Category:Political repression in the People's Republic of China]]