China’s economic boom was based on three legacies of its socialist era: vastly improved population health, eradication of illiteracy, and a country’s population divided into two classes by household registration status. A healthy, largely literate, and underprivileged rural population was the main driving force for China’s economic boom. China had an abundant supply of labor, but it was not just cheap labor – it was good labor, and labor made cheap by China’s socialist legacies that subjected the rural population to secondary citizenship status.