The other day, I saw an interesting article, "Does China have a caste system or is it a figment of imagination of Indians?" It wonders whether "China, the world's manufacturing powerhouse and a socialist state governed by a Communist party", has a birth-based caste system that shapes access to education, healthcare, and opportunity.
Authored by Avinash Kateel and published in India Today, the article quotes social media to say that the debate has "gained traction online" after Indian users drew parallels between China's social structure, arguing that an individual's opportunities are often shaped by the circumstances of their birth. It says China's hukou household registration system allegedly creates a rigid, inherited hierarchy that influences access to education, healthcare, welfare benefits, and economic mobility.
Referring to ancient China's hierarchy-based four-occupation system which existed under imperial rule -- Shi-Nong-Gong-Shang -- the article says it classified people into four broad groups: Shi (scholars and officials), Nong (farmers), Gong (artisans and craftsmen), and Shang (merchants and traders).
Abolished after the Communist revolution in 1949, the article says, China introduced the hukou system, a household registration regime which divided people into two birth-based groups -- rural and urban. It is an internal passport system which determines access to public services such as education, healthcare, housing, and social welfare, while historically restricting large-scale migration from rural areas to cities.
To justify the argument, the article, which appeared online on June 19, 2026, quotes Aravindan Neelakandan's book A Social Dharmic History of India, which argues that the hukou system evolved into a form of state-sanctioned social stratification in China, finding it similar to the Indian caste system.
While I could not find the book online, I could easily access Neelakandan's article in the well-known right-wing online journal Swarajya, which appeared back in 2020. The article, objecting to what it calls "global outrage against Indian caste system", says China's hukou system is "worse".
Neelakandan regrets that "it is only in the context of India that social hierarchy and social exclusion are used to essentialise Hindu culture and religion, as if they alone define Indian culture and society." Wanting jaati and varna to be "studied for its pros and cons as well as fundamental deficiencies in the context of historical dynamics", Neelakandan says, "Traditional Chinese society had its own social discrimination like any other premodern society... The system was inherently biased against the 'peasants' or in traditional Indian terminology the 'shudras'."
"It severely restricted the access of a peasant to quality education, medical services and a decent lifestyle. But like most traditional systems encountering modernity, it was undergoing changes for the better in pre-Mao China -- and like most traditional hierarchies it was flexible," he says.
After the Chinese revolution, "the system became birth-based and the residency status became inheritable. The anti-peasant masterstroke of the Maoist regime is that the inheritance was not patrilineal but matrilineal."
According to Neelakandan, "In India, the Maoist-Marxist narrative accuses Manu and Hinduism of denying education to the masses which was quite untrue. In the case of China, Maoism did exactly the same in quite a diabolical way." Thus, the hukou system made urban state schools -- which were always remote from villagers -- effectively out of reach for the rural folk, amounting to an apartheid in the education system "designed and implemented to specifically exclude the masses."
Neelakandan believes, "While in India, knowledge has been sought across all strata of society for liberation and seeking of truth, in China it has been for becoming 'an official' -- a surprising resonance with Macaulay's 'education for creating clerks'," calling it a kind of bureaucratic feudalism, with party cadres closely controlling peasants.
He underlines, "What we have in China is then not an evolved system of social hierarchy and exclusion as in India, a situation which forces social emancipation within the very Indian culture... What we have in the Maoist regime is an imposed structure of social discrimination, which is designed with the singular aim of benefiting largely the elite and their posterity."
He continues, "In India, society at large, reformers and the state fight against caste discrimination while in China the state has designed and imposed the system... Hukou is a system that serves as the basis for a nationally uniform institutional exclusion with a scope, rigidity, effectiveness, and resilience rarely seen elsewhere."
This made me turn to what the official Chinese media has to say. In an article objecting to Indian netizens' allegations that China has a caste system, the authors Liu Caiyu and Liu Xuandi writing for Global Times say the claims "reflect ignorance of Chinese historical culture."
Referring to Indian social media users sharing memes about ancient China's four occupations (Shi-Nong-Gong-Shang: scholars, farmers, artisans, merchants) by framing them as equivalent to India's hereditary jati system, Caiyu and Xuandi say that stratified beneath the emperor were four distinct commoner classes: the Shi (scholars and gentry), the Nong (peasant farmers), the Gong (artisans and craftsmen), and the Shang (merchants), adding, "Outside this social order were the Jianmin, a group historically regarded as occupying the lowest rung of society."
Global Times holds that the Chinese four-tier hierarchy and the Indian caste system are totally different. The ancient concept of Shi, Nong, Gong and Shang was simply an occupational order, not a hereditary caste system so deeply rooted that despite laws declaring everyone equal, caste still governs marriage, friendships, and daily life in reality. "And they've even exported this mess worldwide with their diaspora," the paper says.
What Global Times does not seek to answer is whether the hukou system, which replaced the hierarchical setup after the Chinese revolution, ensures the exclusion of the rural folk from privileged urban life, and whether it is birth-based. More significantly, while it does mention the existence of the fifth outcast group, the Jianmin, lowest in the ladder of social hierarchy, it does not explain whether they are similar to the fifth category in India -- the outcastes classified as Dalits or scheduled castes.
Ironically, neither the India Today piece nor the scholar Neelakandan cares to even refer to the Jianmin. Why they don't is difficult to understand. Is it selective amnesia? Or is it because mentioning the Jianmin would compel them to acknowledge the existence of untouchables in India and describe their plight -- particularly the lowest rung among Dalits, the Valmikis?
A look at internet sources suggests that the Jianmin (贱民), literally meaning "mean people" or "debased people", were a distinct legal and social category in imperial China, representing the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy. They shared several striking structural similarities with India's untouchables, or Dalits.
In traditional Chinese society, commoners were ideologically divided into four broad occupational classes -- Shi-Nong-Gong-Shang. The Jianmin existed entirely outside and below this four-tier system. They were legally defined outcasts seen as inherently inferior to commoners, or Liangmin ("good people").
Unlike Dalits, however, the Jianmin were not a single unified group but rather a collection of disparate populations across China, often tied to specific historical events such as losing a war or committing rebellion, or to stigmatised occupations. They included the Danmin (Tanka), the boat people of Guangdong and Fujian who were legally barred from living on land; the Yuehu, or "music households" of Shanxi and Shaanxi, whose descendants were forced into entertainment, acting, and prostitution; the Duoer (or Duomin), outcasts in Zhejiang who worked as musicians, undertakers, and scavengers; and low-level government workers such as jailers, executioners, and runners.
Were they untouchables? In terms of hereditary status, Jianmin status was inherited -- if your parents were Jianmin, you were born into it. They faced extreme social exclusion, were forced to live in segregated areas or on water like the Tanka, wore specific clothing, and were strictly forbidden from marrying commoners. Unlike commoners, they were also legally prohibited from taking the Imperial Civil Service Examinations, which completely stripped them of the primary path to social mobility in imperial China.
However, a further search reveals the points where the comparison breaks down. The primary distinction lies in religion versus state law. While Indian untouchability is deeply rooted in religious concepts of ritual pollution, karma, and purity, the exclusion of the Jianmin was fundamentally political, occupational, and legal. They were not viewed as spiritually polluted in a way that required ritual cleansing if touched, though they were heavily looked down upon and avoided socially.
And because their status was codified by state law rather than immutable religious dogma, it could be undone by the state. In the 1720s, the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing Dynasty issued a series of imperial edicts legally emancipating various Jianmin groups, effectively abolishing the status on paper -- though social discrimination took generations to fade.
Today, unlike the Dalits, the legal category of Jianmin is completely extinct, and the vast majority of their descendants have been entirely assimilated into mainstream Han Chinese society. Because their status was defined by state law rather than a rigid religious caste system, once those laws were stripped away and society underwent the massive upheavals of the twentieth century, the physical and social boundaries keeping them isolated largely dissolved.
This happened in three major waves. The Qing Edicts of the 1720s legally emancipated them, allowing them to marry commoners and take the Imperial Examinations, though local social prejudice persisted for another two centuries. The 1949 revolution founding the People's Republic explicitly banned all feudal class categories, and the new government launched aggressive campaigns to eliminate systemic discrimination, declaring all citizens equal under socialism. Finally, the group whose distinct identity lasted the longest into the modern era was the Danmin or Tanka -- the boat people -- because their isolation was physical, lived entirely on rivers and seas in southern China. Between the 1950s and the early 2010s, the Chinese government launched massive relocation programmes, subsidising housing to move the remaining boat communities onto dry land.
Today the Tanka are fully integrated. Villages once built entirely on water have transitioned to modern onshore towns, and younger generations attend the same schools, work the same jobs, and speak the same regional dialects as their neighbours. As for other Jianmin subgroups such as the Yuehu or the Duoer, their assimilation is so complete that most of their descendants do not even know their ancestors belonged to a degraded class. They simply carry common Chinese surnames and live normal lives.
In places like Fujian and Guangdong, older boats, fishing tools, and historical photographs have been moved into local museums. The unique identity that once forced them to the bottom of society is now treated as a historical maritime heritage.
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