At this very moment, in a major Chinese city, a worker is
boarding a train home. His journey is just one of 3.4 billion
trips that will be taken during China's Lunar New Year. An
unprecedented number of Chinese will travel home this year to be
with family and friends during the holiday, making it the
world's largest annual migration of people. Their yearly
homecoming has been repeated over and over for the past two
decades, reuniting families in the villages with the workers who
have fueled China's economic miracle. But that growth has come
at a tremendous personal cost thanks in part to a household
registration system called "hukou." The hukou is akin to an
internal passport that divides the population into rural and
urban residents. As such, migrant workers are prevented from
accessing social services in the city they're working in. The
deeply discriminatory nature of China's hukou system came into
clear focus last month after the fatal collapse of a bridge in
Henan. Local media reports said victims' famili