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Vol. 82/No. 1 January 1, 2018
Migrant workers in Beijing mobilize to protest evictions
BY EMMA JOHNSON
Thousands of migrant workers in Beijing are fighting back against a
stepped-up campaign by city officials seeking to force tens of thousands
of them out of the area. City officials have demolished whole
neighborhoods, in some instances ordering residents to pack up their
belongings and leave with less than a day’s notice.
The city government is targeting these workers, the “low-end population”
as officials call them, to free up land for profit-hungry real estate
developers and replace the migrant workers with middle-class layers.
But the “low-end” workers are striking back. Hundreds gathered Dec. 10
in Feijia village on the outskirts of the city and hung a banner
reading, “Violation of human rights” across the front gate of the
village committee’s office. They rallied for several hours before police
dispersed them.
In another neighborhood residents blocked a major roadway, chanting, “We
want heat! We want to eat!” In other areas workers have organized to go
to the local government to demand their rents be reimbursed.
Officials used a Nov. 18 fire in Xinjian neighborhood as a pretext to
intensify and speed up the evictions, claiming they were acting to
ensure people’s safety. Nineteen workers were killed and eight injured
in the burned-out building, where more than 400 residents were crammed
into 108-square-foot rooms, three to five in each. Many of the rooms had
no windows.
Following the fire, the government declared a 40-day campaign against
“illegal structures.” Authorities had tolerated, inspected and taxed
these buildings for years.
“They never said it was illegal when it was built, or when they came to
inspect it, or when we paid our deposits, but now we’re being told to
move,” Luo Haigang, a driver who was given two days’ notice to get out,
told the New York Times.
They threw people, young and old, out into the streets in the middle of
the coldest days of winter. Xinjian was reduced to rubble within a week.
“They called us at 5 a.m. and by 8 a.m. they had arrived with demolition
equipment,” Bi Yanao, a 54-year-old worker who has lived in Beijing for
13 years, told Japan Times. “In just one hour they flattened a
100-meter-long [109 yards] stretch of land.”
How many of the 175,000 residents in Xihongmen township, which contains
Xinjian village, will be pushed out is unclear, but hundreds of people,
possibly thousands, are on the move. Similar eviction notices are being
enforced in other parts of the metropolitan area, affecting some 100,000
people.
In the summer the government began demolishing some of the city’s
largest migrant schools. There were several hundred schools a decade
ago. Now there are only about 100 left.
Shantytowns like Xinjian encircle Beijing’s outskirts, housing the
city’s more than 8 million migrant workers. The buildings are draped in
tangled power lines supplying a maze of apartments, garment plants,
small factories, shops and restaurants along narrow alleyways.
Beijing officials have targeted six downtown districts where they plan
to carry out a 15 percent cut in the population within the next two
years. That amounts to 2 million people. They plan to demolish 15 square
miles of “illegal structures.”
Close to 40 percent of Beijing’s residents are migrant workers. They are
the millions who have run the factories, restaurants, delivery
companies, construction sites and retail shops as the city and economy
have grown. As migrant workers they have no hukou — Beijing household
registration — which means they have no access to medical care, social
services and schools. Their wages are low, their hours long and their
working conditions abysmal. The average rent in the city equals 58
percent of the average income, but fully 100 percent of low-paid
migrants’ income.
Over the last three decades hundreds of millions of young people have
left rural areas and poured into the factories and construction sites of
Beijing and China’s coastal boom towns, providing the cheap labor for
capitalist expansion.
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