The hukou or residence registration book system, which became the norm in China from 1958 onwards, distinguishes between individuals according to the type of book they hold, in particular agricultural or non-agricultural. The new forms of mobility that have emerged since the early 1980s, by dissociating official and real domiciliation, have led to the coexistence of citizens enjoying very unequal rights depending on where their hukou is registered . They are accompanied by an a priori mistrust of those who are officially domiciled in another locality, especially if it's a rural one.
Such a situation could be analyzed in terms of the sudden increase in anonymous movements in a society where, until now, everyone was assigned to a particular place of residence, be it geographically, socially or politically. Instead, this talk will focus on the situation of generalized mistrust that prevails in China today, and the suspicion that affects both near and far. In our view, this situation cannot be understood without returning to the crisis of social reality that marked the end of the 1970s, at the end of the singular political experience of the first three decades of the People's Republic of China. We will show that this crisis arose from the difficulties encountered during these decades in imagining, testing and experiencing social reality, leading to a form of "deinstitutionalization of the real".
It was against the backdrop of such a crisis of social reality, but also of its negation, that political and economic reforms were launched in the early 1980s. They led to unanticipated transformations, a rupture of experience that was readily emphasized in economic terms, but denied in historical and political terms. The continuity between the Maoist and post-Maoist periods is officially and publicly claimed, but the past, its "ghosts", its linguistic distortions and its normative uncertainties are not made sense of. In contemporary China, there is little tolerance for discussing the decades 1949-1979, just as there is resistance to asserting that they have become strange, or foreign. Yet it is difficult to talk about yesterday with today's words, just as it is difficult to talk about today with yesterday's words, even if these have not been officially disavowed. Connecting the past to the present thus proves singularly difficult. The result is linguistic confusion, normative anxieties, and particular difficulties in saying, in the present, "who is one for the other".
