Research On The Change Process Of Household Registration System In China

The household registration system has a history of thousands of years in China,and it affects everyone’s rights and daily life.With the rapid development of economy and accelerate of new urbanization process,the household registration system in China is being reformed constantly.This paper will summarize the characteristics of the household registration system in the process of change by sorting out the change process of the household registration system since the founding of the People’s Republic of China,and analyze the factors affecting of the institutional change.It is an attempt to analyze the change of household registration system in China based on the concept of path dependence of historical institutionalism.The historical institutionalism theory,developed in the west in the 1990s,makes causal analysis of the system from a historical perspective.Historical institutionalism focuses on the changes of institutions in the historical process and the interaction between institutions and the environment.Historical institutionalism explain how the system changes,to what extent,and the reasons for its changes.When explaining the institutional change,historical institutionalism attributes the reason why the institution is stable for a long time to its path dependency.Then can the path dependence of historical institutionalism explain the change process of household registration system?In this study the household registration system in China is expounded in three stages:From the founding of new China to before the reform and opening up(1949-1978),reform and opening up to the abolition of the household registration system(1979-2014),the abolition of the household registration system to now(2014-2019).Then concluded that although the household registration system has been under reform,it still exists.In the process,although the restrictions on population mobility were gradually relaxed and the distinction in the nature of household registration was abolished in 2014,the urban-rural separation pattern of household registration was not really broken in the end,and the imbalance of development still existed.It means that the household registration system in China has formed a strong path dependency in the process of change,and the initial arrangement of the registration affects the subsequent arrangement of the registration.In order to further analyze the causes of such path dependency,this paper divides the possible influencing factors in the process of change into two parts:system and structure,and analyzes them from four perspectives:governance concept,policy environment,industrial structure and population composition.Finally,we can conclude that the path dependence of the change of household registration system in China is the result of the combination of the governance concept of system and structure divided into governance concept,policy environment,industrial structure and population composition.Although the degree of impact is different in each part,but more or less will be affected.