A villager prepares for cooking in Jindingshan village, Beijing. The village was once home to over 100 panhandlers. Photo: CFP

Walking along the narrow roads of Jindingshan village, the garbage piled up on both sides of the street fills the air with an unpleasant stench and countless advertisements for rental properties are pasted on the walls. A rusting steel fence blocks the road halfway up a hill, and the bungalows on the hillside are being demolished. The whole village is oddly quiet.

The village, located outside one of the terminal stations of Subway Line 1 in Beijing, was once home to over 100 panhandlers from all parts of the country and thus was nicknamed "beggar's village" in the capital.

For the past several years, beggars that ranged from kids to elderly people put on their ragged begging clothes, brought speakers and walked to Pingguoyuan station in groups in the morning to start their work, and then returned to their rented bungalows at 11 pm.   

But as the Beijing government cracked down on people begging in subways this May, most beggars have moved out of the village. Their clothes and speakers that were scattered in the yards a few weeks ago all disappeared with them.

"Beijing is so big, they'll find their home," a villager surnamed Liu told the Beijing Youth Daily when asked about the beggars' whereabouts.

Wealthy tenants

Liu, in her 50s, has been the landlady for many beggars over the past few years. One of her properties was once rented to eight beggars who each paid a monthly rent ranging from 200 ($32) to 300 yuan.

She was reluctant to rent the place to beggars at first, but she changed her mind as more and more came to the village.

Eventually, Liu could only rent the property to beggars as no one else was interested in living there. "Who would pay money to live with a bunch of beggars?"

The beggars used to haggle with her over the rent, but Liu did not know that most of her tenants earned far more than her each month by begging.

Beggars who come from the same part of the country would live and work together, and a group could sometimes contain more than 10 people.

"The main purpose of begging in groups is to avoid being bullied by beggars from other places. And living together could ease the pressure of paying rent," the Beijing Evening News quoted a beggar from Shandong Province as saying in 2012.

Each group had its own leader who was usually older than the others or had been begging for a long time. The leader would divide beggars into smaller groups and assigned them different subway lines to beg on, the Shandong beggar said.

A beggar surnamed Wang, in his 60s, was a leader of such a group. He would divide his six group members into three groups, each containing a man and a woman. The small groups would often swap their partners, so that sometimes they could appear to be a couple and pose as a mother and son at other times.

They could each earn up to 20,000 yuan a month during good times, according to the Beijing Evening News.

According to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, the average wage in the city in 2012 was 5,223 yuan per month.

Vanishing beggars 

Villagers believed that a new subway regulation that had taken effect since May 1 had something to do with the disappearance of the beggars.

Under the new regulation, beggars will be fined a maximum of 1,000 yuan if they are caught begging in a subway train. The city's traffic authority dispatched 60 law enforcement officers to fine beggars starting this month.

As of May 15, 33 instances of begging have been stopped by law enforcement officers though not a single fine was levied.

The presence of law enforcement officers acts as a deterrent to beggars and the number of beggars has gone down. "We saw a beggar limping in the subway, but he ran away rapidly after seeing us," Li Haitao, chief of the Beijing Municipal Transportation Law Enforcement Corps, was quoted as saying by the Beijing Youth Daily.

"The subway ticket price increased last December, and now they are prohibited from begging, so they might think it's not worth living here," Liu said.

Beggars used to pay two yuan to beg for a whole day, but now they have to pay more for a ticket, and have to pay extra if they stay more than four hours in the subway.

They left the village also because of a local demolition project. Many of the bungalows at the foot of the hill in Jindingshan have been demolished, and more bungalows on the hills will soon be torn down, a villager said. 

They may return

The traffic authorities in many cities in China have launched similar campaigns to crack down on beggars on public transportation, however, most beggars just lie low during the campaign and return after it ends.

As of 2014, a total of 2,031 relief organizations have been set up to safeguard the rights of the homeless in China, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

But with the large amount of money on offer, it is difficult to persuade people to stop begging.

An employee in a Chongqing shelter told local news portal cqnews.net that social workers would come to persuade beggars to live in a shelter and then help them travel back to their home towns and their families, but beggars would often turn down their offer as they could earn up to 500 yuan every day, more than many white collar workers.

Li Chonghua, a professor with the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences, said that begging disturbs the social order and wastes public resources.

In his survey on curbing begging, Li suggested the government improve that the subsidy offered to disabled people and poor families to help their long-term prospects rather than just providing them with a short-term shelter, and encourage more social organizations to help homeless people.