To whatever extent you want to misuse the term, America has more of a caste system than China.

Okay ... how, in America do I get in-house "help" for a dollar, let's say per hour?

>Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workf...

>13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)

So, just make a timemachine to go back over 100 years, easy right?

Which system is China's caste system in your mind?

From what I've read (which admittedly limited to media available to an American), there is an urban/rural differentiating system whereby rural folks can be identified by their identification card (I think by number) and need to apply for low-paid migrant labor work in urban centers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingong

The distinction between this and implicit systems of caste found in Western countries (like US racial inequality), in my mind, is that it is a caste system that's embedded into and enforced by their legal system.

It's disappointing to me, too. If there's one noteworthy plus-side to any communist system, it should be an unyielding commitment by the communist party NOT to allow a legal system that enforces a class system. It's like the one thing they should be good at, even if nothing else.

Thanks for clarifying. Hukou itself is indeed very bad. There's a few subtle details which made it not feel like a (traditional) class system to me. tl;dr it's no longer a urban/rural class system, it's more of a born-in-Beijing/Shanghai vs others class system.

AFAIK, the urban/rural differentiating part (农业户口; "agricultural hukou" vs urban hukou) is no longer relevant. The "you can't have social welfare where you want to live/work; you can only have social welfare where your hukou is at" part is still relevant and unlikely to be changed in the near future.

Thanks to capitalism, what type of hukou you have no longer limits what kind of work you can do. Most of the mingong-s do low-paid migrant labor work because on the market that's the best they can do with their skills. I have talked with a software engineer at Tencent who was claiming to have rural hukou. This is generally true, to the point that rural hukou holders no longer want to convert their hukou to the urban one, from [1]:

> A recent study [2] finds that only one-fifth migrant workers are interested in converting their rural hukou to urban hukou, as they are unwilling to give up their rural land – valuations having increased sharply in recent years.

It is still unfair to them because of the welfare thing mentioned above, though. But it is not because of the urban/rural difference: for example, if someone has a urban hukou in, say, Zhengzhou (a city with 12mln people), they still can't have welfare in Beijing even if they lived in Beijing for 10+ years. Which is also why they don't convert to urban hukou unless it's Beijing/Shanghai one - benefits of poorer cities are meh, and it is not possible to convert back so they lose their lands permanently.

[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-hukou-system/

[2] https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Rural-Chinese-in-no-hurry-to...

Sorry for late response. Yes, I did some further research and it turns out your characterization of the Hukou system is much more accurate than mine, which is why you find disclaimers and such on my comment. Mea Culpa.