Blockchain Chicken Farm

Your ancestral home is often where your hukou, or household registration, is, part of a government system that incentivizes people to stay in certain geographical areas. If you were lucky enough to be born in Beijing, you’d receive a Beijing hukou and numerous benefits, including access to almost fully reimbursed health care in Beijing, home to some of the best hospitals in the country. You’d also receive education for your children at top schools, and they’d be given a lower bar for standardized test scores to get into the country’s top universities, Tsinghua and Beida (Peking University). On the other hand, if you have a hukou in a rural area, you are given a title to a piece of land you can farm, which technically you are stewarding for the government. If you do decide to migrate to the city, your children’s access to Beijing’s wonderful schools is limited. The amount you get reimbursed for a hospital visit in Beijing is next to nothing, and if you did have dreams of upward mobility by attending Tsinghua or Beida, you’d have to outrank native Beijingers on standardized tests, all the while harboring little hope that you’d be one of the lucky few to bypass the hukou-based admissions quotas at these schools. Despite all these disincentives to leave, more than three hundred million people have left their rural homes in search of work in nearby cities, creating China’s economic miracle over the past thirty years.