Does China have a caste system? What recent online debates capture and miss

Shi-Nong-Gong-Shang: Scholars, the others, and the marginalised

A June 18 Global Times report on the online posts appeared critical of the comparison of the four occupations with the Indian caste system. It quoted Zhang Yiwu, a professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University, as saying: “The ancient concept of Shi, Nong, Gong and Shang was simply an occupational order, not a hereditary caste system.” He called it “entirely different” from the Indian system. 

Global Times is the English mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and often provides insight into official perspectives and the messaging the government wants to send out to the world. 

In an article for the journal Chinese Historical Review, Professor Victor Cunrui Xiong located the earliest confirmable date of this fourfold “Simin” class system to 685 BC, but wrote that it may have been a century or two older. He noted how several ancient Chinese texts made some differences in the categorisation, at times even changing the order of the groups.

Farmers were held up as valuable producers and generally kept above merchants, who were often seen as profit-seeking, but scholar-officials (the “shi”) consistently remained at the highest level.

This 10th-century painting by artist Zhou Wenju — ‘A Literary Garden’ — depicts a literary gathering. Wikimedia Commons

He wrote: “While the shi were linked with the ideal moral, being junzi, translated as the gentleman or the superior man, the non-shi sectors of the population, particularly farmers, were perceived as belonging to an inferior group, that of xiaoren or ‘small persons.’” 

The article cited Zuo Zhuan, a book of historical commentary, which said: “The junzi respects talent and ability, and is willing to yield his place to his abler inferiors. The xiaoren works the land to serve his superiors. This way propriety prevails between ruler and ruled. Flattery and backbiting are kept at a distance thanks to lack of contention for power. This is known as perfect virtue.” Such a conception is in line with Confucian philosophy, which regards hierarchical social relationships highly.

Conversely, it compared changes in this system to disorder: “In times of chaos, the gentleman brags about his merits to lord it over the small person, the small person boasts of his techniques to look down on the gentleman. Propriety no longer exists between rule and ruled, tumult and violence occur simultaneously thanks to contention for self-improvement.”

Another passage described the relationship thusly: “The gentleman works his brains, the small person works his brawn.” 

Gradually, Professor Xiong wrote: “As occupational specialization developed, there occurred an increased realization of the importance of merit over hereditary rights.” Further, total exclusivity was not a feature of this classification, with people periodically changing their occupations. 

The classification, he wrote, also left unaccounted for a “sizable minority of people… who were constantly at the very bottom of society, referred to as the “base people or jianmin”. “Because of their low legal positions, and almost zero chance for inter-group and upward mobility, these people constituted the lowest class comparable to the ‘untouchables’ in India,” he added. 

This category included a range of occupations, from so-called menial work to those in entertainment and prostitution. Over centuries, however, the whole system underwent modifications and faded away, replaced by other classifications driven by socio-political shifts. 

It is not an exact parallel to the caste system, which also derives legitimacy from religion and its associated morality and philosophy. And while many global social systems of stratification have been compared to caste, the latter has evolved over centuries but has endured to significantly affect modern India in a way few social structures have.

Hukou: Solidification of regional differences 

One relatively newer system that has endured and continues to affect the lives of Chinese people is the mandatory household registration system, known as hukou. 

In their book, The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China (2025), authors Hongbin Li, Ruixue Jia and Claire Cousineau wrote: “The hukou serves as a household registration system assigned at birth; it is often likened to a caste system. The system assigns social benefits based on one’s place of birth.” 

Being born in a rural or urban region dictates the entitlements and opportunities a child can access over the course of their life, with an individual having little control over the cards they have been dealt.

For example, the university entrance exam, the gaokao, must be taken by a student within the hometown province as written on their hukou. Each region’s educational institutions can set a quota for local students, advantaging people who hail from cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, having a high concentration of premier colleges.

A Gaokao site in China, 2022. Wikimedia Commons

This also poses problems for migrant workers’ children, who must go to their hukou hometowns to give the exam. Until October last year, cross-region migrant couples also had to return to their hometowns to register their marriages.

The origins of the hukou can be traced back to the 1950s, the first decade of the modern communist state. “The designs of the hukou system and its meaning of social and geographical control are meant to stimulate the country’s then planned economy by facilitating city-based citizens to support heavy industrial development and by using peasants to maintain the surplus of agricultural goods,” wrote Chinese sociology scholar Jason Hung in a 2022 article for the journal Social Sciences.

With economic liberalisation in 1978, cheap migrant labour became a necessity for powering industrial growth and some relaxations were allowed. Between 1990 and 2020, China’s rate of urbanisation jumped from around 26% in 1990 to 66%.

However, Hung wrote, for non-local and rural hukou citizens who come to the cities, their status “has remained an entrenched barrier to upward social mobility for non-local citizens… they are excluded from enjoying the majority of social, economic, cultural and other welfares that are designated for urban natives, compounding their socioeconomic vulnerability.” 

Global Times’ own previous report said, “nearly 300 million long-term urban workers and residents have yet to achieve ‘full urbanization’”.

Since 2014, the state has attempted to liberalise the system, and more recently, it has been seen as crucial for reviving domestic consumption and insulating China from global trade headwinds. In May this year, the state announced guidelines on providing basic public services based on where people actually live, rather than their hukou registration.