Rural land is organized in communes, you can move to the countryside from the city, but you must be invited into the commune or rent from it as a tenant, costing you for the privilege of using their land.
The cities are only so big as they are developed, and growth takes time and energy. Due to the market, living in the cities costs more, so you can move from the countryside to the cities, if you can afford it (i.e. stable job), which is hard because the city can only plan for so many jobs in any given time.
Moving like that is difficult, and is more expensive than staying put, because the real economic cost of such a move has an expensive impact on the whole economy. This applies everywhere, which is why some lineages haven’t left Southside Chicago or South Central LA since it those neighborhoods were redlined, and the life expectancy is almost a decade shorter than the metro average:
Movement only “feels free” in the US, because much of the population is able to pay for the freedom of movement (using surplus labor).
This system is also partially why many of the big cities are provinces in their own. It gives provincial, and hukuo powers to the urbanites to decide how they want to grow (within the constraints of the overall state plan). In the US, instead it’s often people with freedom cash pushing out existing urbanites, sometimes into the outskirts, sometimes into more concentrated enclaves, sometimes onto the streets.
Rural land is organized in communes, you can move to the countryside from the city, but you must be invited into the commune or rent from it as a tenant, costing you for the privilege of using their land.
The cities are only so big as they are developed, and growth takes time and energy. Due to the market, living in the cities costs more, so you can move from the countryside to the cities, if you can afford it (i.e. stable job), which is hard because the city can only plan for so many jobs in any given time.
Moving like that is difficult, and is more expensive than staying put, because the real economic cost of such a move has an expensive impact on the whole economy. This applies everywhere, which is why some lineages haven’t left Southside Chicago or South Central LA since it those neighborhoods were redlined, and the life expectancy is almost a decade shorter than the metro average:
Movement only “feels free” in the US, because much of the population is able to pay for the freedom of movement (using surplus labor).
This system is also partially why many of the big cities are provinces in their own. It gives provincial, and hukuo powers to the urbanites to decide how they want to grow (within the constraints of the overall state plan). In the US, instead it’s often people with freedom cash pushing out existing urbanites, sometimes into the outskirts, sometimes into more concentrated enclaves, sometimes onto the streets.