Sublime

Westerners, like the Jesuits, were welcome to come. But they had to stay and adapt themselves to Confucian ethics: they could not expect to come and go as they pleased.

Migrant workers are also unable to get residence permits, called hukou, and without hukou what limited protection workers may have is sharply reduced because living in an urban area without the proper hukou is tolerated but technically illegal.

Modern China has many tools of social control. Within living memory, most Chinese residents worked inside a danwei, or work unit, which governed one’s access to essentials like rice, meat, cooking oil, and a bicycle. Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from

Sichuan province. I was posted to a city named Neijiang (Inner River), located on a bend of the Tuo River.