5 Shi Jin - Food Stamp Jiangyou, Sichuan

Chinese county-level grain coupons like this one were instruments of the rationing system administered under the hukou framework — a household registration mechanism that tied food allocations to specific localities. A coupon issued by Jiangyou County's Grain Bureau was redeemable only within that county's network of state grain stations, making it functionally useless ten kilometers past the jurisdictional boundary. This was deliberate policy, not administrative oversight.

By 1980, the national rationing apparatus was already fraying at its edges. Rural decollectivization was quietly accelerating under the household responsibility reforms, and local grain bureaus were issuing these coupons into a system that would be substantially dismantled within a decade. Jiangyou itself is in Mianyang prefecture, a grain-producing region where the irony of rationing rice in rice country was not lost on residents.