China’s government wants students and workers to found startups in the countryside

China’s government is on a bit of a startup kick. The State Council recently approved a host of new measures aimed at making startups easier in general, and at a meeting on Tuesday it also laid out a new vision for bringing entrepreneurship to the countryside in China.

According to Sina Tech, at Tuesday’s meeting the State Council expressed its intent to offer more support to college graduates and migrant workers who wish to return to their countryside homes and pursue startups there. The Council aims to greatly streamline the registration and licensing processes required so that founders can more easily set up new companies in their home villages. It will also offer tax cuts, reduced-rate services, increased access to loans and credit, founder training, and even accelerators and incubators focused on startups with aims of developing in the countryside.

At present, these measures are just part of the State Council’s vision, not actual services that are currently available to founders. But the plan to push China’s burgeoning entrepreneurs out to develop the countryside makes sense. Nearly half of China’s population still lives in rural areas, and the economic and technological development of these areas has moved at a much slower pace than it has in China’s cities. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai may boast first-world services like wifi-equipped buses, but there are still many areas of China where you’d be lucky to find something as simple as indoor plumbing. And over the past decade, most of the entrepreneurial talent developed in these areas has moved to the cities to help develop things there. Moving some of it back into the countryside to help rural areas catch up seems like a noble goal.

In practice, though, it could prove difficult to entice entrepreneurs into going home. Smaller markets mean smaller scale and smaller profits, which doesn’t have the same appeal as the dream of becoming a billion-dollar unicorn for startup founders (even if for most of them that dream is totally unrealistic). And of course, starting a business in the countryside means living there – that in and of itself could be a tough sell for many would-be entrepreneurs who have migrated to the cities and gotten used to the bustle and convenience of city living. If you’re a Beijing-based college grad who enjoys ordering anything you want on Taobao in the morning and getting it by courier that same afternoon, the prospect of returning to a place where the chickens outnumber the people and nobody’s even heard of Uber may not be that appealing.