VOLUME V, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 2
Present-Day China, Four Tools in the Struggle over Scarce Resources
The previous section finished America's four tools. This section looks at another civilization, China, household registration, the school district, the official establishment post, and the inside of the system, entirely different in shape from America's, and yet exactly the same at the root. Once these two civilizations are both seen, the eight sections of this run on scarcity will have reached their end, and this section will gather them together at its close before crossing over to the space between nations. Keep the same discipline as with America, no judgment, no side taken, only the facts laid out, and let the reader see through to the pattern himself.
One. First, Household Registration
China's household registration system was established in 1958, dividing the entire population into agricultural and non-agricultural registration, binding a person to a place, with schooling, employment, medical care, and retirement all running on two different systems behind it. After reform and opening, the system loosened, and farmers could go into the cities to work, but the registration itself remained, and inside the very same city, a local registration and an outside registration carry different access to schooling, medical care, and buying property, one piece of law splitting the people of one city into two tiers.
The most direct example is schooling for children who move with their migrant parents. A person who leaves an inland province to work in a large city may have a child born and raised in that city, and yet, having no local registration, that child must return to the family's original province to sit the college entrance exam, where more candidates compete for a lower acceptance rate, so that the very same exam score might reach a top university in the large city but only an ordinary college back in the home province, one line of registration deciding a child's entire starting line for life. In recent years some cities have opened a points-based path to local registration, but the threshold sits high, and most ordinary working people cannot reach it. Today, registration in a first-tier city is scarcer than a patent, because the schooling, medical care, and property rights bundled with it add up, over a lifetime, to a value in the millions. Shang Yang, in the state of Qin, organized farmers into registered units and forbade them from moving freely, and the 1958 household registration is, in a sense, a modern version of that same law, more than two thousand years apart, the shape changed, the root unchanged.
Two. Next, the School District
China's school district logic runs word for word the same as America's good school district. The law provides for enrollment by proximity, each school matched to a district, which sounds entirely fair, everyone attending the school nearest them. But add in the gap between a good school and an ordinary one, and it turns instantly into a contest over scarcity. A handful of top secondary schools control a large share of admission slots to the top universities, and getting in generally requires living inside the matching district, so that district housing becomes one of the largest scarce resources of all, with some district apartments running well over ten thousand dollars per square meter, and an old, small unit running into the millions, parents spending their entire savings and grandparents adding their pensions on top, all so a child can attend that one school.
The law does not forbid a poor family from buying district housing, the law simply requires enrollment by proximity, but once the good school and the district housing are tied together, educational fairness turns instantly into real estate scarcity. This maneuver is every bit as refined as the quiet doors of America's elite schools, on the surface everyone has the right to attend school, in practice everyone is sorted into different tiers by district housing. Confucius's ideal, spoken twenty-five hundred years ago, of teaching without regard to class, has still not truly landed even in the country that today prizes education the most.
Three. Next, the Establishment Post
The establishment is a distinctive Chinese concept, civil servants, public institutions, and state enterprises all carry it, and whether a post carries establishment status or not, even for identical work in an identical position, means an enormous difference in pay, benefits, pension, and social standing. In recent years, millions apply for the civil service exam, with only one or two in a hundred admitted, the contemporary version of the imperial examination.
Why do so many crowd toward the establishment. Because the establishment means stability, dignity, and security, and while output has not yet grown fully stable, it serves as a hedge against risk, an insurance on one's position. Law frames this scarcity of the establishment so that only a few can obtain it, and the rest are left crowding outside. This runs on the same essence as the founding of the imperial examination under Sui and Tang, which pulled the contest for position out of the battlefield and into the examination hall, and today's civil service exam pulls the economic contest out of the marketplace and into the examination hall in just the same way. Han Fei wrote that the sage weighs how much resource there is and how thick or thin the circumstance runs, and sets policy accordingly, and today's civil service exam is the newest version of exactly that line.
Four. Last, the Inside of the System
The inside of the system is a larger concept still than the establishment, encompassing party and government bodies, public institutions, state enterprises, the military, and universities, forming a core circle. Once inside the system, a person's position for life is largely secure, perhaps not greatly wealthy, but not greatly poor either, perhaps with somewhat less freedom, but with security. A large share of young people today aim, above all, to get inside the system, because outside it, market risk, industry swings, and the danger of unemployment in middle age fall on the individual alone, while inside it, much of that risk is carried collectively. But positions inside the system are naturally scarce, a province may have only a few dozen bureau-level posts, and most people spend their whole career stopped at a section-level rank.
Here again, hold the same discipline, no judgment, no side taken. This system carries its own rationale, holding steady the basic order of well over a billion people and supporting more than seventy years of development, and it carries its own cost, fierce competition and a compressed space for the individual, both sides need to be laid out. Seen by position, it is a legal tool built to manage the scarcity of position, the same at root, different in shape, as America's quiet doors into elite schools and its political contributions. Laying this out is not to say which system is better and which worse, it is to let the reader see clearly that two civilizations, using two entirely different sets of tools, are doing the very same thing.
Five. String the Eight Together and Look
America's patent, credential, real estate, and political contribution, China's household registration, school district, establishment post, and inside of the system. Every one of the eight is a legal tool built for the contest over scarcity, every one favors whoever already holds a position, every one is fair on the surface and unequal underneath. America's tools run more through the market and more hidden, China's run more through administration and more direct, entirely different in shape, and word for word the same at the root, insufficient output, scarce resources, the strong legislating to hold them alone.
Young people in China speak of involution, young people in America speak of running in place, young people in Japan speak of being a corporate worker bee, young people in Europe speak of an unstable life of gig work, different names, the same feeling, the same root. The root Han Fei named more than two thousand years ago, the root Huang Zongxi named more than three hundred years ago, still run on the very same logic today across two great civilizations, only dressed in different clothes.
Six. Gather This Whole Run on Scarcity Together
From why law exists at all, to the four kinds of scarcity, to the long line of land, to examination, marriage, and learning, to the three roads of the weak, to why reform is never complete, to the eight tools of contemporary America and China, eight sections strung on a single thread. From the root proposition to the four kinds, from history to the present, from China to the West, one single logic runs through three thousand years and both East and West alike.
The one thing this whole run has truly established is this, law is not a justice fallen from the sky, it is a tool grown from the ground, its lawmaker the strong, its root insufficient output, its purpose holding scarcity alone, and reforming the law can only exchange the strong, it cannot abolish the strong. A thousand years of history, ten thousand miles of distance, the difference between Chinese and English, none of it blocks this same logic from running straight through. As for the question of what is to be done, this run does not answer it, this volume does not answer it, this volume only lays out the positions and sees through them, the way out belongs to the volume on saving people later in this work, and only after reading through this whole set of positions, and then that volume, will the reader understand why it was written the way it was.
Seven. The Position Set by This Section
This section sets the thirty-third layer. Contemporary China's four tools, household registration, the school district, the establishment post, and the inside of the system, share the same root as contemporary America's four tools, in different shapes. This whole run on scarcity, from beginning to end, only lays out positions and passes no verdict, judging neither the strong, nor siding with the weak, nor calling either civilization better or worse, only letting the reader see through to the pattern himself.
Having seen through it, the reader will know for himself which kind of scarcity he is caught in contesting, which road he is walking, and on what position his own expectations of the law are actually built. That is enough. The rest of the judgment belongs to the reader.
The next section pulls the lens up from inside one nation to the space between nations. Everything discussed so far has stayed inside one country, the strong and the weak, the legislator and the legislated upon. But between nations, between the taker and the taken, is there any law at all. The answer will surprise a great many people. Carry the positions this whole run on scarcity has set, and walk into the next section.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.