Bianhu () was a system of

household registration Civil registration is the system by which a government records the vital events (births, marriages, and deaths) of its citizens and residents. The resulting repository or database has different names in different countries and even in differen ...

introduced following the

Qin unification Qin's wars of unification were a series of military campaigns launched in the late 3rd century BC by the Qin state against the other six major Chinese states — Han, Zhao, Yan, Wei, Chu and Qi. Between 247 BC and 221 BC, Qin had emerged as ...

in 221 BC. The system transformed individual

household A household consists of two or more persons who live in the same dwelling. It may be of a single family or another type of person group. The household is the basic unit of analysis in many social, microeconomic and government models, and is im ...

s into a category labelled the "

common people A commoner, also known as the ''common man'', ''commoners'', the ''common people'' or the ''masses'', was in earlier use an ordinary person in a community or nation who did not have any significant social status, especially a member of neither ...

listed in the household register".Xu, Ting. (2010). The End of the Urban-Rural Divide? Emerging Quasi-Commons in Rural China. ''Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie''. 96 (4): 557.

References

Legal history of China Civil registries Family registers {{China-hist-stub