户口 hù kǒu
The household register that ties you to a place.
The short answer
Hukou is China's household registration: an official record tying a person (and often their family line) to a specific place, which has historically gated access to local schools, healthcare, and housing benefits.
What it means
Every Chinese citizen has a hukou — a registered household, usually inherited from parents and tied to a locality. Where your hukou sits decides, in many cities, which public schools your children may attend, which hospitals charge you local rates, and whether you can buy certain homes.
That is why the word carries so much feeling. A worker in Shenzhen may have a rural hukou a thousand kilometers away; her child may need special permission — or expensive workarounds — to attend the school across the street. Reform has loosened many rules, but the register still sorts people in ways that matter.
How people use it
落户 — to settle one's hukou in a new city, the prize in most cities' talent-chasing schemes: points for degrees, taxes paid, social security contributions. 农村户口 and 城市户口 — rural and urban registration, the old divide. 北京户口 — the Beijing hukou, famously valuable and famously hard to get.
In family planning, the phrase 为了孩子上学 — for the child's schooling — is the standard preface to any hukou saga: moving, divorcing on paper, buying small apartments near good schools.
Where it comes from
Registering households is ancient Chinese statecraft — dynasties counted mouths to tax and to conscript. The modern system took shape in 1958, when internal migration was brought under administrative control; for decades it bound rural and urban populations to separate life chances.
Since the 2000s, reform has aimed to unwind the hierarchy: small cities largely open, big cities competing for skilled migrants with points-based 落户, and calls to decouple public services from registration entirely. The direction is clear; the pace is the story.
In use
2 examples为了孩子上学，他们想把户口迁到市区。
For their child's schooling, they want to move their hukou into the city center.
他在这座城市工作了十年，去年终于把户口落在了这里。
He worked in this city for ten years; last year he finally settled his hukou here.
The characters
Explore individuallyIndividual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.