China’s Politburo has just set the country’s economic priorities for the second half of the year. The official readout did not describe the economy as K-shaped or echo the central bank’s language of structural divergence. But this framing makes China’s productivity challenge look mainly technological. A more fundamental test lies in what happens to its more than 301 million migrant workers . Under the urban-rural household registration system, migrant workers remain registered as rural residents while taking up non-agricultural jobs.