Based on case studies of 12 firms, this research documents how the hukou-based human resource management (HRM) system in contemporary China informs six human resource management functions. It is shown that the system has generated a division between urbanites as core employees and rural migrants as peripheral workers. Rural workers tend to suffer from job and wage discrimination and have less access to training, welfare benefits, social insurance, and promotion than urban-hukou holders. The hierarchical nature of this division reflects the fact that human resource management policy and practice in China is a product of the larger institutional environment and lends support to the theoretical notion of ‘socially embedded HRM’.
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Zhang et al. (2010) studied this question.