New walls extra obstacle for migrants seeking big city life
- Source: Global Times
- [08:02 August 11 2010]
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Illustration: Liu Rui
By Paul Nash
We drove slowly past the iron gates and into the walled compound, our driver nodding a thank-you to the guard on duty, who waved back lethargically and pressed a lever inside his booth causing the gates to close behind us.
Driving on, across the darkened campus grounds, we came at last to our gloomy destination, an apartment complex of red brick with a heavy wooden door and bars covering the ground-floor windows. It looked more like a prison than a home.
That was 16 years ago, the night I took up residence as an English teacher in Shijiazhuang, four hours southwest from Beijing. Looking back on my initial misgivings about the "compound" I was to call home for the next year, I can't help wonder at the controversy now hanging over walls lately built around villages outside Beijing.
Under a special pilot project, 16 villages in Beijing's Daxing district have introduced an "enclosure management system" to control the flow of migrant workers and improve public security. Boundary walls started going up last April, fitted with surveillance cameras and guarded gates where residents are required to show ID cards as they come and go.
There is little new in these throw-backs to China's traditional walled communities.
The practice of gating and walling houses, villages and even whole cities in China, once symbolic of a grander cosmic order, is as old as the Middle Kingdom itself. China's Great Wall, built over centuries as a bulwark against marauding raiders, was also used to control and centralize trade and travel. The principle continued into the post-1949 era in the style of work unit compounds.
If China's latest walling experiment seems draconian, consider the masses of surplus agricultural laborers flocking to eastern industrial cities.
In a country where rural inhabitants have traditionally outnumbered the urban, it's produced a demographic structural shift of colossal proportions, probably the largest in human history.
But migrant workers now seem a big problem.
It's not merely that they are putting tremendous stress on urban infrastructure. Without official residency permits in the city, they find themselves with limited access to public services, such as medical care and schooling for their children.
Facing discrimination in the competition for jobs, many are forced into low-paying, high-risk industries. Some are targeted by organized crime. Human trafficking, slave labor and prostitution thrive on these communities.
Migrants themselves are turning to crime at an astonishing rate, and the problem is likely to worsen. The government estimates that the countryside could yield up another 150 to 170 million people. In the next five years, the urban population is expected to outstrip its rural counter-part for the first time.
Beijing, designed for 18 million people, reached 19.7 million last year, with 5 million of them unregistered.
A top Beijing official recently visited Dashengzhuang, a village on the southern outskirts participating in the pilot project. It holds a "floating" population of 2,400, with seven migrants to every permanent resident. He said the system has "significantly slashed the crime rate and improved public order."
But some observers claim the enclosures transform villages into prisons and stigmatize lower-income citizens. Local shopkeepers blame them for ruining their business. Others question the viability of expanding the project to the whole cities.
It's anyone's guess how all this might play out. Public opinion is sharply divided. How should Beijing balance its responsibility to ensure public safety and order while remaining sensitive to the rights of all citizens?
In the end, I was glad of our college's walls and gates and guards, for they did prevent some crime. When, for instance, a student of mine fell into a heated argument with a local electrician, he got carried away and threw a brick. It struck the electrician on the forehead, sending him away in a rage. Shortly afterwards, the front-gate sentry prevented him from re-entering the compound with a butcher's knife. It ended in a reconciliation in a restaurant across the street, but without the walls the ending could have been far bloodier.
The author is an investment analyst living in Canada who previously taught in China. viewpoint@globaltimes.com.cn
