Just making urban hukou easier to adopt (which is something that multiple municipalities slowly started doing in the late 2010s) isn't enough to solve the social mobility issue.
Parents won't give up rural hukou if it also means losing your landholding and early retirement stipend benefits.
If you're a migrant worker from a rural household, you are most likely an unskilled laborer and are earning around $300/month, with dad working on a construction site or Meituan and mom working in a factory doing unskilled assembly or service job.
Around $150 is spent on incidentals because living in an urban area is expensive, an additional $100 is sent back to your family (grandma, grandpa, kids because the one child policy was largely ignored in rural China) back home in your rural town, and you might have $50 left over to save for retirement, healthcare, etc.
This is not enough to buy urban property, which is the asset class that appreciated the most in China, and this means the only large asset you have is your rural landholding. Furthermore, that early retirement benefit means you're earning an additional $15-20/month while continuing to work as a laborer or a Meituan delivery driver.
Fundamentally, salaries are too low in China and the social safety net is nonexistent, and this is what is causing the issues like overproduction, deflation, and sagging consumer demand which we are seeing nowadays.
The only way to solve this problem is to either expand the welfare system dramatically (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by having to save less) or increase wages (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by allowing them to save at the same rate while spending more). Working on increasing the quality of life in rural China would also help dramatically.
Sadly, Chinese leadership at the top level continues to ignore social welfare spending and rural China due to financial and moral concerns.
Parents won't give up rural hukou if it also means losing your landholding and early retirement stipend benefits.
If you're a migrant worker from a rural household, you are most likely an unskilled laborer and are earning around $300/month, with dad working on a construction site or Meituan and mom working in a factory doing unskilled assembly or service job.
Around $150 is spent on incidentals because living in an urban area is expensive, an additional $100 is sent back to your family (grandma, grandpa, kids because the one child policy was largely ignored in rural China) back home in your rural town, and you might have $50 left over to save for retirement, healthcare, etc.
This is not enough to buy urban property, which is the asset class that appreciated the most in China, and this means the only large asset you have is your rural landholding. Furthermore, that early retirement benefit means you're earning an additional $15-20/month while continuing to work as a laborer or a Meituan delivery driver.
Fundamentally, salaries are too low in China and the social safety net is nonexistent, and this is what is causing the issues like overproduction, deflation, and sagging consumer demand which we are seeing nowadays.
The only way to solve this problem is to either expand the welfare system dramatically (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by having to save less) or increase wages (thus incentivizing the bottom half to spend more by allowing them to save at the same rate while spending more). Working on increasing the quality of life in rural China would also help dramatically.
Sadly, Chinese leadership at the top level continues to ignore social welfare spending and rural China due to financial and moral concerns.