Hukou-Based Discrimination, Dialects and City Characteristics

The hukou system is one of the most specific as well as consequential institutional features of contemporary China. Linking Chinese citizens' rights with official-and hard to change-status and place of residence, it has far-reaching social and economic implications, especially on internal migration. The consequences of the hukou have been a subject of unabated debate, especially as for the discrimination rural migrant workers might face in cities. In this paper, we rely on a series of CHIP (China Household Income Project) surveys from 2007 to 2018, to contribute to this debate by investigating the roles of two sets of factors that have been generally disregarded by the literature so far: at the individual level, the role of the dialect distance, between a migrant's origin and destination areas, and, at the macro level, the influence of destination city's characteristics, such as population, GDP and FDI. Results show that a sizeable part of the hukou-related wage gap can be explained by our dialect distance variable, and that the hukou-related wage gap also highly depends on destination cities' characteristics.