1. On 16 February 1984, Renmin ribao (People's Daily) published an article (on p. 3, translated in U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service [hereafter, FBIS], 28 02 1984, pp. P5–6Google Scholar) praising the practice of several counties (Hunan's Cili county, Guizhou's Meitan county and Hebei's Gucheng county) where peasants, making their own arrangements for grain rations, settled in towns to run shops and factories. The paper claimed this activity facilitates commodity circulation between town and country and is accelerating the development of the rural areas' commodity production. In the story, peasant households made this move with the permission of the local industrial and commercial administrative departments and the public security, taking up temporary residence, obtaining commercial licences and even getting aid from the public security in establishing household registration. But less than a month later (Renmin ribao, 15 03 1984Google Scholar) the same paper carried a frontpage reprimand to Liuan county in Anhui where cadres in the public security and food grains departments “utilized their power of approval to seek private advantage,” illicitly helping some people to switch their rural household registration to urban registration. Either there is a proper and an improper way to carry out the same sort of work, or different localities are engaging in essentially the same behaviour on their own, with varying central-level assessments of it.

2. Orleans, Leo A., “China's urban population: concepts, conglomerations, and concerns,”Google Scholar U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Hardt, John P. (ed.), China Under the Four Modernizations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), p, 278Google Scholar, cites “constant directives and exhortations to control the influx of peasants and to ‘dissuade farmers from pouring blindly into the cities’” beginning in 1953. This was the year when urban registration (in preparation for the first national post-liberation census) and rationing began. See White, Lynn T. III, Careers in Shanghai: The Social Guidance of Personal Energies in a Developing Chinese City, 1949–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar, on this whole set of issues – labour control, household registration, contract and temporary labour, migration and residence control – as they operated in Shanghai in the 1950s and early 1960s.

3. This directive was printed in Renmin ribao, 14 12 1957Google Scholar, and noted in Howe, Christopher, Employment and Economic Growth in Urban China 1949–1957 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1971), p. 135Google Scholar. Blecher, Marc, in his “Peasant labor for urban industry: temporary contract labor, urban-rural balance and class relations in a Chinese county,” World Development, Vol. 11, No. 8 (1983), pp. 731–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar analyses the temporary contract labour system that grew out of that directive; its practice is also described in Xiyang county in Tsou, Tang, Blecher, Marc, Meisner, Mitch, “Organization, growth and equality in Xiyang county: a survey of fourteen brigades in seven communes (Pt II),” Modern China, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1979), pp. 139–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Howe, Christopher, Wage Patterns and Wage Policy in Modern China, 1919–1972 (Cambridge: The University Press, 1973), p. 106Google Scholar, which states that, “After 1956, enterprises had to negotiate labour contracts with collectives (communes)”; and Emerson, John Philip, “Urban school-leavers and unemployment in China,” The China Quarterly, No. 93 (03 1983), p. 9Google Scholar, where he notes that after socialist transformation direct hiring ended. And in Emerson, John Philip, “The labor force of China, 1957–80.”Google Scholar in Hardt, (ed.), China Under the Four Modernizations, pp. 251–52Google Scholar, the contract labour system is defined.

4. Emerson, , “Urban school-leavers and unemployment,” p. 8.Google Scholar

5. Howe, , Employment and Economic Growth, pp. 133–35Google Scholar, describes the centrality of labour bureaus in this line of work in the 1950s.

6. Blecher, , “Peasant labor for urban industry,” pp. 742–43.Google Scholar

7. Emerson, , “Urban school-leavers and unemployment,” p. 15Google Scholar, notes two estimates for rural unemployment in 1978 of 40 and 90 million, which, respectively, would account for 15% and 33% of rural labour. Probably the situation has worsened since the rural responsibility system got underway: one broadcast from early 1984 (in FBIS, 1 03 1984, p. K20Google Scholar), cites a “huge surplus labor force in the rural areas,” noting that, “according to investigations conducted in various localities, the surplus labor force in the rural areas accounts for some to 40 percent of the total labor force.”

8. Howe, , Employment and Economic Growth, pp. 27, 70–71, and 78–79.Google Scholar

9. Orleans, , “China's urban population,” p. 278.Google Scholar

10. Renmin ribao, 9 06 1983, p. 1Google Scholar and Beijing Review, No. 35 (29 08 1983), p. 6.Google Scholar

11. Renmin ribao, 7 07 1983, p. 1.Google Scholar

12. For a study of the fluctuating treatment accorded small-scale private-sector traders and workers over the years 1980 to 1983, see my “Commerce: the petty private sector and the three-line struggle in the early 1980s,” in Solinger, Dorothy J. (ed.), Three Visions of Chinese Socialism (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984).Google Scholar

13. Howe, , Employment and Economic Growth, p. 24.Google Scholar