Membership Rules and Realized Entitlements: Gateway Enforcement in China’s Hukou System
Published:
This paper studies China’s Hukou system as a membership architecture. A person may live and work in a city while remaining registered elsewhere, and that status can affect school admission, medical reimbursement, housing-related eligibility, and conversion to local membership. The paper’s central distinction is between formal claims and realized entitlements: status may assign a claim, but administrative gateways determine whether the claim becomes usable in practice.
We frame Hukou as a sequence of membership assignment, entitlement schedules, gateway enforcement, and conversion rules. Front-end gates, such as school admission and housing eligibility, screen households before use and may appear mainly in access reliability or satisfaction. Back-end gates, such as medical reimbursement, operate after use and should appear in both the receipt and size of realized inflows.
Summary and Contribution:
We provide a conceptual and empirical analysis of residence-based membership and gateway enforcement. Conceptually, the paper explains how administratively mediated claims become economically meaningful only when gates make them exercisable. Empirically, we use an original 2018 survey from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou (N = 1,565) and zero-aware monetary estimates with city fixed effects.
The setting is useful because it studies membership-conditioned access within a single country, currency, legal system, and broad credential regime. This provides a within-country lens for studying how residence-based membership affects realized access while avoiding many confounds that accompany international migration.
Evidence:
The clearest pattern appears in healthcare: local registrants are more likely to receive medical reimbursement and report larger payments and higher health outlays. Housing and education monetary outcomes show no robust membership differences, while selected satisfaction specifications point in a direction compatible with front-end screening. Local registration is also modestly associated with higher consumption outside those domains. These estimates should be read as associational rather than causal.
Authors:
Jiajing Sun, Michael Cole, Fwu-Chang Yan, and Yupei Han.
Availability:
A July 2026 preprint is available via ResearchGate:
Recommended citation: Sun, J., Cole, M., Yan, F.-C., & Han, Y. (2026). Membership Rules and Realized Entitlements: Gateway Enforcement in China’s Hukou System. Preprint.