In ninth grade my biology teacher took a vote about whether to do this for one test. I voted against it (in the minority). It didn’t take three tests to see the effect. Immediately people stopped studying for the test. We failed. The teacher cheated and gave us all a C.

What does an apocryphal story about a highly simplified and disingenuous demonstration of socialism have to do with anything?

Ok, cool. Despite Snopes saying that never happened, China doesn’t do that; in fact they have more billionaires than the US. It’s almost like they learned from the failures of other communist states and adapted their system.

What they have done is create a base standard of living that is dependent on location. They can’t move every rural farmer to urban population centers all at once, so they’ve been doing it gradually over time. Do a lot of Chinese live in poverty? Yeah, but they’ve been living in poverty for a few hundred years. A lot fewer live in poverty in 2021 than in 1990.

Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city?

Trying to force this doesn't make sense to me.

Because agricultural modernization universally requires at least an order of magnitude less labor, and society is then better served by those workers being in urban centers where they can work first in factories then transition to a service economy for the ones who'll work unskilled labor, and concentrate access to quality education for the ones that can contribute intellectually.

Those "ghost cities" that the media pearl clutched for a while there have for the most part been slowly filled in with previously agrarian workers making the urban transition.