There is no doubt that the existence of the household registration system has a positive significance for social stability. However, once people are subject to a piece of household registration, they will naturally lose the freedom of movement to choose the right of residence. When society undergoes great changes and social mobility accelerates, the household registration control system will inevitably change.

The people of the Ming Dynasty lived in a period of social transition, especially after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, which was characterized by rapid changes. If the social changes of the Ming Dynasty are examined in the context of "social mobility" and "urbanization", the loosening of household registration control in the middle and late Ming Dynasty is quite obvious, and it can provide many useful references for the reform of the current household registration system.

1. Establishment of household registration control: road guides, household posts, and yellow books

After the establishment of the Ming Empire, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, strengthened his strict control over society and population by taking two major measures. The purpose of this is, of course, to ensure the long-term peace and stability of the Ming Dynasty.

First of all, it is the implementation of the "road guide" system. In the Ming Dynasty, the road guide, to put it bluntly, was a road, which was roughly similar to the letter of introduction issued by the local government today, so that people could go out to do business, work or even visit relatives in the city. The fundamental purpose of Zhu Yuanzhang's national policy was to let his subjects under his rule regain their identities as scholars, farmers, industrialists, and merchants, and let the traditional four people keep their own business, even doctors and fortune diviners, and force them to be "indigenous" and not to travel far. Anyone who has nothing to do and is idle, or someone who moves or hides elsewhere as a nomad, is relegated to the outlands.

The "Great Edict" promulgated in the early Ming Dynasty with a legal nature also required neighbors to know each other about the number of people in their respective homes and the occupations they were engaged in. For example, craftsmen and merchants should be clear and open-minded in their guides, whether they are traveling long distances, or by water or land, and carry them with them when they go out. Many historical facts have proved that the strict control policy in the early Ming Dynasty was indeed well implemented. For example, in the fifth year of Hongwu (1372), someone went out to seek medical treatment because of his grandmother's sudden illness, and when he left, he was in a hurry and forgot to lead the way, and was found by the Changzhou Lucheng Inspection Division, and was to be sent to the legal department for punishment. Although this incident was exempted from punishment because of the leniency of Ming Taizu, it also reflected from the side that the control of the population in the early Ming Dynasty was quite strict, and people lacked freedom of movement. As for the historical data saying that "there is no group drinking at night, and there is no night trip in the village", it is by no means an exaggeration, but a record of the early Ming Dynasty.

The second is the establishment of the household registration system. The household registration system established at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty is mainly divided into two parts: one is the "household post" and "household by" prepared by each family, which is equivalent to the household registration book of each family now, which is collected by the household itself, and has been promulgated as early as the third year of Hongwu (1370). The items contained in the household post, including the head of the household, the village where he lived, the ownership of the household (i.e., whether it is a civilian household or a military household, etc.), the number of households, and the property (the real estate and land owned by the family), and the household is printed in half. The second is the household registration, also known as the "yellow book", which is the household registration made by the state in the Ming Dynasty for the purpose of verifying the household registration and recruiting and assigning service. The yellow book is a summary of household posts, that is, 10 households are a first, 110 households are a mile, with the local prefecture and county as the statistical unit, and then summarized and collected in the central household department.

The official promulgation of the Yellow Book was as late as the 14th year of Hongwu (1381). In this year, the Ming government ordered that everyone in the world should occupy the nationality with "their own name". The so-called "occupation of nationality by one's own name" means that people of different occupations occupy different household registrations and undertake different errand services to the state. For example, the households that undertake the people's errands, the military households that undertake the military errands, the artisan households that undertake the work, and the stove households that undertake the cooking of salt are respectively classified as the military, the people, the craftsmen, and the stoves. In addition to these four basic household registrations, the household registration of the Ming Dynasty also had the names of archers, shoppers, doctors, Confucianists, merchants, officials, sages, and guards.

All of the above-mentioned household registrations are part of the registration records of good citizens. In the Ming Dynasty, only the wandering food singles were stateless, and they were called "stateless people", even if the magistrates registered them, they were also included in the "abandoned people book". In addition, such as the Nanjing Jiaofang Division and even the Lehu and Shaoxing lazy people in the royal palaces, they belong to the untouchables and can only be named lowly, thus reflecting the difference between good and low in the hierarchy of etiquette and religion.

Acceleration of social mobility – "few indigenous people and more visitors"

Although the system of creating a copyright every ten years in the early Ming Dynasty was still implemented in the middle and later periods, it was often a mere formality, which eventually led to the acceleration of social mobility and the falsification of the registered population.

According to the traditional concept, the four people, scholars, farmers, industrialists, and merchants, each have a fixed job, and then the people's will can be determined; and if the people's will is certain, the world will be greatly governed. However, since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, social changes have not allowed the four people to live in peace and specialize in their own work. The increase in the enslavement of the imperial court and the intensification of land annexation in the countryside have led to the disintegration of the traditional foundation of social rule, and the peasants who have lost their land or are no longer able to survive in the countryside have to seek a new place to settle down in the cities.

After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the phenomenon of population movement generally appeared in all social strata, and the most basic form of mobility was travel or residence. In detail, it is mainly reflected in the following five aspects:

The first is the scholar's residence. In the Ming Dynasty, the style of scholars and scholars was quite popular, and mountain people and tourists were all over the place, which was bound to bring the problem of "impersonation" in the imperial examination. In the Ming Dynasty, the system of taking scholars, from the prefectural and county examinations to the township examinations, required scholars to return to their hometowns to take the examinations, and impersonation was prohibited. However, after the middle of the Ming Dynasty, many prefectures and counties had "few indigenous people and many guest residents", and the emergence of this phenomenon undoubtedly brought severe challenges to the issue of nationality in the imperial examination.

As for those intellectuals who have lost their future in the imperial examinations, they have maintained their livelihood by traveling all over the world, especially in Shaoxing. In the Qing Dynasty, because of the fact that the master of Shaoxing traveled to the world, there was a common proverb among the people that "sparrows, tofu, and Shaoxing people (everywhere)". However, this phenomenon has begun to emerge at least in the Ming Dynasty, especially in Beijing, where the positions of the six scribes were mostly entrenched by Shaoxing people, and even inherited from generation to generation, which led to the formation of special communities for Shaoxing people in the suburbs of Beijing.

The second is the movement of peasants. According to the records of He Liangjun of the Ming Dynasty, before Zhengde, one-tenth of the people served in the official service, and nine-tenths were in the family field. At that time, the four people had their own fixed jobs, and the peasants were content with their fields. Since Zhengde, due to the increasing taxation and the increasing burden of forced labor, there has been a phenomenon of peasants migrating to work one after another. Most of these landless rural laborers went to the cities to earn a living, and their livelihood mainly included becoming village officials and servants, serving as yamen soaps, or running industrial and commercial businesses, and working as coolies.

The third is the merchant's residence. Due to the narrow land and vast population, such as Huizhou in Anhui Province and Fuzhou in Fujian Province, the local land resources are obviously unable to meet the basic needs of residents to earn a living, and can only flow outward. For example, the pawn shops in Nanjing, before Zhengde, were all opened by locals, but in the Wanli period, these pawn shops, silk shops, and salt shops were basically occupied by the rich people of other provinces and foreign provinces, indicating that a large number of foreign merchants poured into Nanjing City to do business.

Merchants were perennial in foreign business, marrying wives and having children in their guest settlements, a phenomenon that had arisen in large numbers by the Orthodox years at the latest. The records of the Ming people Qiu Jun show that a large number of people in Jiangxi migrated outward at that time, living in Jingzhou and Huguang. As soon as they lived in the local area for a long time, they bought properties one after another, and were even listed as "tax households".

Fourth, it is a residence for craftsmen and skilled people. After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, most of the craftsmen left their hometowns and worked abroad, earning money and supporting their families with their own crafts. In particular, craftsmen from Jiangxi Province and people with skills such as medical divination and astrology have traveled all over the world, and even formed agglomeration communities such as "Nanchang Street" in some places. In order to make money, some craftsmen even went to some frontier areas. For example, in Xuanfu Town, craftsmen from all over the world gathered, such as civil craftsmen, mainly from Shanxi, and scarf and hat craftsmen, from Jiangxi.

Fifth, it is the residence of the soldiers of the guard. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, due to riots in the border areas, some sergeants followed the army to conquer. After the chaos was settled, he stayed nearby. As the children and grandchildren multiplied, the population gradually increased, and gradually became local immigrants. For example, the sergeant of Ningxi in Lanshan County, Hunan, was from Nanjing in the twenty-third year of Hongwu (1390) with the army, and then stayed in Ningxi, and set up a city to defend it. After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the family surname Fanchang, in addition to the original tuntian, also began to purchase private fields.

In the guard house, in addition to the officers, soldiers and people, and the remnants, there are still some rogue officials. Most of these rogue officials were miscellaneous positions, and there was little hope for a career in the office, so they settled in the Wei Institute, and their children also entered the Wei School to study, and participated in the imperial examination as a Wei member.

3. Loosening of household registration control: Floating populations are allowed to register in local households, and are allowed to participate in scientific research in other places

In the face of the acceleration of mobility at all levels of society, the Ming government had to make appropriate adjustments to the hukou policy, which in general was in line with the increase in mobility and the hukou control policy tended to be partially loosened. The reform of the household registration policy in the Ming Dynasty generally included the following two aspects:

First, through the setting of "guest registration", the floating population is allowed to occupy the local household registration. For example, Beijing in the Ming Dynasty was known as the "Four Directions", and not all the residents were local aborigines. In the late Ming Dynasty, six or seven tenths of the population living in Beijing were immigrants, or sojourners, or guest registrations. Among these immigrants, Shaoxing accounted for four-tenths or five.

Since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming government has allowed the existence of vassals. In the first year of orthodoxy (1436), Emperor Yingzong of the Ming Dynasty ordered that all people who had lived in various places and lived for a long time and did not want to return to their homeland were allowed to occupy their nationality in the prefecture and county where they lived. In the sixth year of Jiajing (1527), Ming Shizong issued an edict to inspect the imperial history of the city, let them strictly supervise the officials of the Soldiers and Horses, and investigate the soldiers and civilians living in Beijing and nearby. This is an official order that allows the resident to be naturalized locally.

Second, through the establishment of new forms of household registration such as "business registration" and "health registration", the problem of the floating population's qualification for the imperial examination will be solved. During the Jiajing period, the government set up a special business registration for businessmen in the world, such as Linqing in Shandong and Hangzhou in Zhejiang, and many Hui merchants occupied their local registrations. The appearance of merchant nationality not only shows that the merchant has obtained the legal status of the guest residence outside his place of origin, but also obtains the legal household registration of the merchant outside the civil register.

In the household registration system of the Ming Dynasty, the establishment and hereditary status of military registration was obviously to ensure that the army could have a complete reserve of soldiers, so it was quite difficult to remove military registration. It is worth noting that in addition to the military registration, the Ming Dynasty successively added such a household registration name as "Wei nationality". For this reason, the military and the guard began to separate. The main difference between the two is that military registration refers to the household registration of military family members in their hometown, while Wei nationality refers to the household registration color of military families from their hometown and their descendants.

The establishment of merchant and guard registrations has undoubtedly brought a lot of convenience to the children of merchants or guards and soldiers. From then on, their children can legally participate in the imperial examinations in their place of residence. For example, the children of Hui merchants living in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province can register for the local examination through their business registration.

In addition to ensuring the right of the children of merchants and soldiers to participate in the imperial examination through the establishment of merchant and guard registrations, since Jiajing, the "impersonation" of the imperial examination has also begun to be partially recognized by the government. During the Jiajing period, Zhang Li, a Zhejiang Huiji, participated in the Shuntianfu Township Examination and finally won the Xie Yuan. At that time, everyone attacked him in an uproar, accusing him of impostor, but Ming Shizong's answer seemed to surprise the attacker, he said: "The whole world is my talent, why should I be presumptuous?" This obviously gave those scholars who lived in a guest or traveled in a foreign country a default to legally participate in the local imperial examination.

According to the living area, of course, the people of the Ming Dynasty had the difference between "city people" and "country people", and there was no shortage of city people who ridiculed country people with a snobbish and rather superior vision. However, in general, the household registration system in the Ming Dynasty was characterized by occupation of household registration, although in the registration of household registration items, the difference between urban and rural areas of the place of residence of the registered population can be distinguished through the township, but the household registration system does not present a dual structure of urban and rural areas. Now everyone is familiar with the word "hometown", in the household registration book of the Ming Dynasty, "nationality" and "through" are separated, and there can be differences between urban and rural areas, but there is no difference between urban and rural areas, but according to the different occupations and show a diversified color.

The strength of social mobility can probably determine the degree of modernization of a society. In other words, social mobility and the hukou system are mutually reinforcing. The acceleration of social mobility will inevitably lead to changes in the hukou system, which in turn will adapt to and even intensify social mobility.

(The author is a professor at the School of History and Culture, Southwest University)