50 China The EconomistDecember 14th 2019
T
wo chinascollided on a summer night in Beijing this year
when “Little Zhang”, a high-flying young businessman, was
summoned for questioning by an elderly neighbour at his housing
complex, and asked to prove that he is a legal resident of the city. In
the new China where Mr Zhang spends most of his days—a swag-
gering country rushing to become a high-tech superpower—the 31-
year-old is a model citizen. He recently secured a job with a presti-
gious technology company, buoyed by a master’s degree from a
Western university and a stint with a foreign consultancy. In an
older China, a bossy place which issues old men and women with
red armbands and tasks them to sit outside apartment blocks,
snooping on all who pass, he is an object of suspicion.
Despite Mr Zhang’s enviable job, he is legally an outsider in his
new home of Haidian, a district in Beijing’s north-west where
technology firms have sprung up near elite universities. Born in
the neighbouring province of Hebei, Mr Zhang belongs to a tribe of
white-collar migrants who call themselves, with mock-defiant
pride, Beipiao, or Beijing drifters. Its members are hard to spot, but
know who they are. They are well-educated and hail from an urban
area in another part of China. To build secure lives in the capital
they must pull off something hard by changing their hukou, or
household registration, to make Beijing their official home, or,
failing that, by obtaining an employment-related residency per-
mit. Mr Zhang’s interrogation was brief. He showed his national
and company identity-cards to the “old granny” questioning him,
and insisted that he was “definitely an honest citizen”, merely pre-
vented by red tape from obtaining the right documents. Hurry up
and get those papers, she commanded. He did not demur, having
heard the same demand from local police not long before.
Educated urban-born outsiders like Mr Zhang are better off
than working-class migrants from the countryside, many of whom
have been summarily expelled from Beijing in recent years. Still,
when people like him want to start a family, their children are at
the back of the queue for school places in Beijing. They are barred
altogether from sitting university entrance examinations in the
capital. For Beipiao, to buy a home or even a car in Beijing is to
plunge into a briar patch of regulations.
Chinese rulers have long restricted migration between ruraland urban areas, and between big cities. As the capital of the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China, Beijing has endured 70 years of unusually
strict controls. Yet political disciplines are now in tension with an-
other side to the city. Beyond its grey, hulking ministries and Com-
munist Party offices, it is has become an innovation hub, with an
unrivalled range of universities, venture-capital funds, technol-
ogy firms and cultural enterprises. But at private dinners, drinks
parties and off-the-record coffees, Chaguan has heard from bosses
of multi-billion-dollar firms and the founders of scrappy startups
that it is hard to retain middle-ranking staff in Beijing. Many report
that employees, especially those with children, want to move to
cities with easier hukourules, cheaper housing and a better quality
of life, such as the southern boomtown of Shenzhen or the lake-
side city of Hangzhou.
Beijing’s trouble retaining talent raises a question that applies
to China more generally: namely, are there limits to the flourishing
of innovation and creativity in an autocratic, controlling one-
party state? Speak to Beijing drifters, and it is not hard to conclude
that the answer is yes. The limits of the current system are felt
most sharply by the middle tiers of urban society, they say. The rich
need not care about hukoubecause they can secure foreign pass-
ports for their children and send them to private international
schools in Beijing or overseas. As for low-income migrant workers,
they typically leave their children with grandparents back home in
villages and townships. It is the aspirational middle that suffers,
interviewees say. There are other ways in which such folk are left
out. Risk-taking hipsters are still drawn to Beijing, as well as those
who do not care about having children or making much money—
the so-called “Buddha-style young” drawn to Beijing’s surprisingly
irreverent, gritty-yet-arty subculture. The city also attracts conser-
vative-minded graduates willing to work for state-owned firms
that pay badly, but offer easy access to hukouand work permits.
The losers are those who fall between those extremes: people who
want to work for the private sector and build families.
Beijing drifters are masters at hustling around bureaucratic ob-
stacles. A former journalist from central China, now working for a
big technology company, describes friends who took low-paid jobs
with a party newspaper, then a year’s sabbatical to pursue a mas-
ter’s degree overseas—a double-manoeuvre that earned them hu-
kouin Beijing on their return. Another friend worked as a village
official in the rural outskirts of Beijing after graduating. A hukou
was his reward. The journalist’s child, if she has one, will live with
her mother-in-law and be educated in the port city of Tianjin, her
husband’s home town, which has good schools and is a less com-
petitive place than Beijing for aspirants to university.A place to find good jobs, more than a good life
Politics stops some firms moving. A film producer notes that inter-
net and entertainment companies must stay close to government
regulators and censors. But he adds: “If conditions allowed, all
companies would consider moving out of Beijing.” Other cities
have widely discussed limitations. Shenzhen is called a cultural
desert. Shanghai is plagued by snobbish cliques. Beijing may be a
glorious “hodgepodge” of clever people from all over China, as a fi-
nancier describes it. Nowhere is as exciting for a first job. Still, ev-
ery Beijing drifter has friends planning an escape, especially those
who lack hukou in the capital. “Beijing is not a good place to fulfil
their dreams,” explains one citizen of the new, innovative China.
The old China had little time for individual dreamers. In Beijing
those two worlds of creativity and control increasingly collide. 7Chaguan Caught in the middle
An obsession with social control is hindering efforts to turn Beijing into a high-tech hub