| Abstract: | Chinese systems of household registration have long been regarded as marginal areas of interest in Chinese studies. Using recent theoretical work on community, family, policing, and power as the conceptual basis, this study, however, questions such marginalization. We have attempted to plot the role of the household register in the classical and contemporary periods. In the classical period, we suggest, it functioned as a mechanism to police and make visible the order of the family. It did this by renegotiating family relations away from anti-State alliances and by constructing a hierarchy of mutual control which valorized the privileged status of the family. The contemporary system has however moved away from the moral concerns of earlier systems, and centers instead upon questions of population and organization. It forms the basic statistical material of both the welfare system and state planning. It is no longer regarded as a defence of the moral order, rather it constructs itself not unlike domains that once claimed to be Proletarian Sciences. |
