What, what, what does that even mean?

Actually, the Rebbe says in the Sicha that nowadays, um, when things are, when a lot, lots of the parts of the Torah are not immediately practical, it becomes easier to understand how «Lo v'elo divru lekim chaím» because when things go from being practical to being more, um, figurative and more inspirational, you can definitely run with both messages as opposed to in the times when the Yidden were actually bringing Bikkurim, it would be harder to understand how one halakha, one opinion has become the halakha.

The other opinion is just a minority opinion and nobody, nobody behaves according to it.

And yet we say «Lo v'elo divru lekim chaím».

In the Sicha, the Rebbe says that nowadays when we're not doing Bikkurim, it's much easier because both of the opinions are become, become like guiding lights in life, and they're both very useful guiding lights.

One is about trusting the, the instinct of your neshamah, and one is about developing that instinct into something practical in your, with your own intell- intelligence, et cetera.

And everybody understands how neither of those is dispensable and how those are both, those are both true in their own way.

Eli, what do you say about the second level?

What reforms have previously been carried out to the way that system operates, and how much significance would you say we should attach to the recent announcements by the Chinese authorities about its future?

Very briefly, there's some context, historical context, uh, then, and I'll get up to, to 2026, uh, pretty quickly.

But hukou as an institution was formalized in 1958 in the Mao era under the planned economy, and it happened just before the infamous Great Leap Forward.

Basically, what the, the hukou was intended to do at that time was to pin peasants in place so that they could continue to produce, that the state could use this mechanism known as the price scissors to extract more from the countryside than it was investing there, and it could take that surplus and invest it in heavy industry in the cities.

And they wanted to be able to do this to advance this big push industrialization modeled, uh, after the Soviets.

It only worked if the peasants were forced to stay in the countryside because things were better for workers in the cities in the 1950s and 1960s.

And when the Great Leap Forward was happening and the ensuing, uh, famine, you had millions, perhaps tens of millions of people who, who died of starvation.

The final question I want to ask you is whether you would see any forces operating in Chinese society that are capable of shifting China onto a different path from the one that its leaders currently appear to have in mind, whether those forces could be operating from inside the existing power structure or from outside of it.