@samuelszuchan: In China, where your kids go to school is decided by a booklet they inherited at birth. It's called a hukou. It records the family's official household location, which is usually a village in Anhui, Henan, or Sichuan, regardless of where the family actually lives. It was created in January 1958. It has never been abolished. And it controls almost everything that compounds in a Chinese life. A child's primary school depends on it. Whether a student can sit the gaokao, the college entrance exam, in the city where she was raised depends on it. Health insurance reimburses at the rate set by the hukou province. According to fieldwork by Berkeley political scientists, a migrant in Hangzhou recovers about ten percent of a bill that would have recovered eighty percent back in his Sichuan township. Banks check the booklet before issuing housing loans in tier-one cities. Pension funds pay out based on it. It is administered locally and recorded on paper kept by the Public Security Bureau. A migrant child in Beijing who reaches age fifteen cannot take the high school entrance exam there. She returns to the province on her booklet, which she has often never seen. Bloomberg Businessweek profiled an eighteen-year-old named Hu Huifeng in 2016. Born to migrant parents who ran a small lighting factory in Huizhou, Guangdong. At twelve, she was sent six hundred kilometers north to live with her grandparents in Jiangxi, the province on her booklet. By the spring before the gaokao, she was rising at six and studying past midnight. Her father told the reporter: "We would have chosen for our children to be here if it was possible." China has roughly 357 million internal migrants. The booklet follows the bloodline. The bloodline determines the schoolhouse your child is allowed to sit inside. And none of this requires a camera or an algorithm. Just a piece of paper from 1958.

Sam Szuchan

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Region: US

Monday 22 June 2026 19:00:00 GMT