A woman walked into Laosanyu villages in the Daxing District of Beijing.
By HELEN GAO
Published: October 3, 2010
BEIJING — The community is walled and gated, an enclosure of rows of crowded low-rise homes and shops, where people exist in their own worlds, under the gaze of surveillance cameras and apart from the city. The police patrol around the clock, and security guards stop unfamiliar faces to check identification papers. In the morning, only one gate is open, through which parents head off to work and children go to school. At night, the gate is locked, preventing street loiterers from trespassing.
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The area, Shoubaozhuang, is not one of the affluent, gated residential compounds springing up around Beijing, but a poor village of rural migrants toiling at low-paid jobs. It was chosen, along with 15 other villages in the Daxing District of Beijing, to be walled off to outsiders, in what officials say is an experimental effort to curb crime. The authorities say the experiment has been a success — the Communist Party-run People’s Daily said the crime rate in the walled villages in Daxing District dropped by 73 percent from April to July this year — and the “walled village” concept is being quickly expanded to other districts outside Beijing’s center that are populated by migrant workers.
Ultimately, the project could encompass an area of 291 square miles with a population of 3.4 million people, more than 80 percent of them migrant workers.
Some residents welcome the walls and gates as a way of fighting crime, but critics have seized on the ghetto-like villages as a jarring sign of the barriers facing rural migrants settling in urban areas. They say the real intent of the new measures is to keep track of the migrants, and some have labeled the policy a form of apartheid.
This is not the first time Beijing has experimented with walling off migrant workers, though previous attempts have been on a much smaller scale. In the weeks leading up to the 2008 Olympics, the city similarly blocked off workers’ dorms near construction sites as part of an intensive campaign to secure and sanitize the city. The city government labels it “community-style management.”
But experts remain dubious about the long-term effects of life inside the walls on residents who are already socially marginalized migrants or local poor.
“To the migrants, the policy conveys the message that the capital is not theirs, but a capital for citizens with Beijing hukou,” said Peng Zhenhuai, director of the Local Government Research Institute at Peking University, referring to China’s household registration, or hukou, system.
Although increasingly relaxed in recent decades to help integrate laborers into cities, the system still effectively limits many migrants from permanently settling their families in cities by tying access to subsidized services like public education to one’s place of birth.
A newly released report from the municipal legislature indicates that Beijing’s “floating population” had exceeded 10 million by the end of last year, including 7.26 million migrants. As the city’s boom creates jobs in construction and service industries, some villages like Shoubaozhuang, with less than 1,000 original inhabitants, have seen their populations explode in the past five years with the influx of migrants. Most live in low-rise apartments or extensions to buildings constructed by the original inhabitants.
But the population spike has also brought the problems of the city to these areas, most notably petty crime. According to Daxing officials, 80 percent of the crime in the past five years took place in areas dominated by migrants. In Shoubaozhuang, locals have been vexed by everything from street fights to stolen laundry.
The Communist Party secretary for Beijing, Liu Qi, endorsed the new policy in early July, calling it a “positive and effective exploration in the course of Beijing’s urban-rural integration” and proposed extending it citywide. In the Daxing District, 76 villages are set to follow the example of the first 16 by the end of the year. The Changping District, on the northern side of the city, announced plans in July to enclose 100 villages, 44 to be finished within the coming months.
Many experts say that instead of building new barriers, the government should concentrate on forging ahead much faster with tax reforms, expanding low-income housing and transferring factories farther inland, to ease the settlement of migrants into cities, satellite communities and towns closer to their home provinces.
“The integration should come as a result of human interaction, and the government should orient its policy to the needs of its population,” said Lu Jiehua, a professor of sociology at Peking University. He said the government could adopt a policy of allowing migrants in large cities access to social services based on the number of years they have lived there.
Beijing police officials and the village committee representatives equate the enclosed villages to the gated communities in more affluent neighborhoods.
“It offers them the same service as the high-class apartments in the city,” Li Baoquan, a member of a village committee in charge of public security in part of the Changping District, said in a telephone interview. “Of course the villagers would support it.”
And despite the heated social debate and extensive local news media coverage, villagers, burdened with the more pressing issues of finding decent-paying jobs, affordable medical care and schooling for their children, seem far less concerned with the walls in their midst.
A fruit vendor in Shoubaozhuang who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said he had had a few less customers since the enclosure policy was instituted, but also realized the benefits of having a security guard living next door. “He is doing his duty,” he said. “I am selling my fruit. I try not to cross paths with him.”
Gong Daocui, who arrived in Beijing from Chongqing in 2006 to live with her son, said: “We are all workers. What say do we have in the policies they make?”
She sells skewers of vegetables and meat cooked in a spicy soup along the main alley of Banjieta Village, which will soon be enclosed. “If the business can keep going, so be it,” she said, smiling and looking away. “If it can’t, I will pack up everything and retire to my hometown.”
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