The 1958 Regulations on Household Registration formalised the hukou, classifying every person by place of registration and as agricultural or non-agricultural. It tied access to grain rations, housing, schooling and welfare to one's registered locality, sharply restricting rural-to-urban migration. The system effectively froze the urban-rural divide for decades and, after reform, created a vast "floating population" of migrants living in cities without local rights. Partial relaxations continue, but the hukou still shapes who can fully belong to a Chinese city.
It is the single most consequential instrument structuring Chinese urbanisation, determining who may live in cities and on what terms.
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