Evicting Migrants in China

 Zhou Xinci left her hometown in China’s struggling rust belt four years ago for Beijing with little more than the clothes on her back and a dream to one day save enough money to buy a home.

That dream is now fast unraveling as Zhou, 35, watches as her neighbors — other low-income Chinese migrants like her — are being hurriedly evicted from their homes on the outskirts of the capital by the government.

Authorities in Beijing have launched sweeping evictions of workers who have migrated from elsewhere in the country, triggering a public outcry over the treatment of people the city depends on to build skyscrapers, care for children and take on other lowly paid work. The Beijing city government said last year it plans to cap the city’s population at 23 million by 2020 and cut by 15 percent the number of people in six main districts.

China Labor Bulletin spokesman Geoffrey Crothall says the evictions are part of an ongoing effort by the government to redevelop land and capitalize on rising land prices. 

Zhou, whose husband is a factory worker in Beijing, knows their family will soon be next and wonders how they will stay in the city and keep their 9-year-old son safe and in school. “They are chasing people away from apartments and smashing things. How wouldn’t a child be scared? My son is scared and can’t sleep at night, of course I’m scared too,” she said.

Her family now pays 400 yuan ($60) a month to rent a single room big enough for their bed, a wardrobe, television set and refrigerator. But with soaring rents and rising discrimination against migrant workers, she says it will be impossible to find another room.

Whole families have been evicted, often with little notice, leaving them scrambling to transport their belongings in the freezing weather. Many have had to pile their furniture, bags, bedding, clothes and other items into overloaded pickup trucks and vans, discarding kitchenware and other belongings that wouldn’t fit.

“They called us at 5 a.m. and by 8 a.m. they had arrived with demolition equipment,” said Bi Yan’ao, a 54-year-old migrant worker who has lived in Beijing for 13 years, describing what it was like to have to move out of his apartment in Daxing in just a few hours last week, clutching his belongings.

“In just one hour, they flattened a 100-meter -long stretch of land. How scary is that?”

A group of intellectuals signing an open letter to the central government urging the city to stop the evictions and provide temporary housing for the migrants.

One of the signatories, independent political commentator Zhang Lifan, said anger over the evictions showed that rapid economic growth has resulted in a massive accumulation of wealth and also rising inequality and a sense of unfairness.

Zhang said many Chinese were quick to extend a hand to displaced migrants because they too had once been in their shoes, having worked their way up the socioeconomic ladder to secure a decent middle-class life.

“When they saw that the migrants had been evicted, they realized that similar tragedies could have happened to them,” Zhang said.