You raise some interesting ideas however when looking at the system as a whole I don't think they are entirely accurate.

To start I think it's important to note the scale of change in the hukou system in recent times. Cities under 3 million population have essentially removed settlement barriers, and even megacities are piloting residence-based public service access. This is a substantial structural shift reflecting changed material conditions.

The hukou system was also I believe an unfortunate necessity when it was originally put in place. Go to Mumbai. Look at Dharavi. One point seven five square kilometers holding over a million people in informal settlements with no basic infrastructure. That is what happens when capital accumulates without a mechanism to regulate the pace of urban absorption (the original reason for implementation of the hukou system). The hukou system, however imperfect, prevented that outcome. The hukou system functioned as a valve. It allowed industrialization to proceed at a speed that absorbed labor without collapsing urban systems.

It's also important to look at the positives of the system as it remains despite its many shortcomings. Every rural hukou holder retains rights to a homestead plot and contracted land. This is the material basis for China's near-elimination of absolute homelessness. When a rural worker in a city faces unemployment or illness, there is a place to return to. This safety net reduced the fiscal burden on early-stage industrial capital, yes, but it also prevented the formation of a permanently dispossessed urban underclass.

Was rapid industrialization necessary. Absolutely. Not only because of the very real threat of encirclement and containment, which any materialist analysis must account for, but because poverty alleviation on the scale China achieved required a massive productive base. You cannot lift eight hundred million people out of poverty through redistribution of a feudal style economy alone. You need jobs, infrastructure, technology, and the fiscal capacity to fund public goods. That capacity was built through industrial accumulation. The rural industrialization phase, the township and village enterprises, the gradual absorption of migrant labor into manufacturing, these were not arbitrary choices. They were the only path that generated the surplus needed for the later stages of development.

Finally, the gap. It is terrible. But it's important to measure the rise in the floor not just it's gap to the ceiling. In 1978, nearly nine out of ten rural Chinese lived in extreme poverty. Today, that number is zero by the international standard. The roof rose faster creating a gap, yes. But the floor rose from subsistence to basic security, from illiteracy to nine years of compulsory education, from no access to healthcare to near-universal coverage. Uneven development is not a moral failure in the abstract. It is the concrete form development takes under historical constraints.