From Economist.com:
IN A narrow alleyway in Liguanzhuang village, residents idle away a
hot afternoon near a stinking rubbish dump, worrying about when the
bulldozers will come. To prepare for the Olympic Games next year,
Beijing's authorities are removing such eyesores. Old villages
surrounded by the expanding city are being demolished. With them goes
cheap housing, vital to the city's huge pool of migrant workers. China
does not like to admit it has slums. But it does, and it will find it
needs them.
In the past two years or so, cities across China have announced
plans to “transform” these “villages within cities”. Because of the
Olympics in August 2008, Beijing faces a particularly tight deadline.
The aim is to “renovate” (ie, usually, flatten) 171 urban villages by
the end of this year. Between 2005, when the campaign was launched, and
the end of last year, 114 of them were thus transformed.
Officials
have given few details of the number of people affected. A
state-controlled newspaper in 2005 said 33,935 households in 231
villages would be moved out. But these are only the “permanent
residents”, ie, the villages' original inhabitants. They are heavily
outnumbered by rural migrants, most of whom work as traders or in the
city's service and construction industries. Their numbers have soared
as Beijing has boomed.
In a city of fast-rising house prices, the former villages offer
affordable accommodation. Rents are as low as 200 yuan ($25) a month.
The villagers of Liguanzhuang, a cluster of shabby single-storey brick
houses in the north-east of the city, can afford to sit around moaning.
They lost their fields several years ago, but their houses are large by
city standards. They have roofed over their courtyards and partitioned
their homes into tiny, dark rooms, which they rent out. Conditions in
the village are grim. The only lavatories are foul-smelling public
ones. But the slumlords are making an easy living.
Breaking the usual taboo, Qiu Baoxing, a deputy minister of
construction, admitted in a magazine article in May that many villages
within cities had become “Chinese-style slums”. They are indeed
distinctive. In spite of the rapid influx of rural labour into the
cities (by official estimates an average of 8.4m people a year between
2001 and 2005, bringing the total to around 120m), they have not
spawned huge shanty towns. This is mainly because of controls on the
use of rural land for construction. Instead, scattered villages within
cities, often behind walls built to hide their squalor, and old
state-owned apartment buildings have filled the gap.
The villages have survived thanks to the haphazard expansion of
Chinese cities, driven more by the whims of developers and local
governments than by grand municipal plans. It has often proved easiest
and cheapest for these governments to appropriate rural farmland and
leave the farmers in place. To keep them happy, officials change their
residential status from rural to urban. This gives them welfare
benefits and better access to health care, education and city
employment.
Some governments are now regretting their hands-off approach. Many
of the villages have turned into not just slums but also criminal
enclaves. In Weizikeng village about 3km (2 miles) south of
Liguanzhuang, police recently cracked down on a thriving black market
for stolen bicycles. The official media often portray the villages as
rife with drugs, gambling and prostitution—a “time-bomb” of disorder,
as a government adviser put it last year.
Some officials say that controlling the villages was made even
harder by the scrapping four years ago of police powers to detain any
migrant found without the correct permits. Such people were often put
in prison camps for days or weeks and then sent home. From the 1950s
on, Chinese governments enforced a rigid separation between urban and
rural areas. But this began to break down in the 1990s because of the
urban demand for cheap labour. This demand, say some Chinese academics,
will impede government efforts to eradicate the villages. City
governments build low-cost housing for the poor, but only for
registered city residents, and often it is available only at much
higher prices than rooms in the villages. Du Yang of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences says a lack of low-cost housing for migrants
could worsen an emerging shortage of young labour from the countryside.
The eventual goal of Beijing's onslaught is still unclear. A
government survey in 2002 found 332 villages with a total population of
more than 800,000 migrants in the eight urban districts of the city
proper—nearly one-third of the total migrant population. Bao Lufang of
the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences says the government should
refrain from demolishing all of them because of the vital role they
play in encouraging migration.
In 2005, the government reckoned that by the end of this year, it
would have had to spend 15.5 billion yuan ($2 billion) on dealing with
the villages. As registered urban residents, the house-owners are
entitled to urban levels of compensation. In Liguanzhuang they complain
that this will be far from enough. Moving would deprive them of their
rental income.
No plans have been announced for helping the migrants find new
homes. In a recent study, Miss Bao wrote that fewer than 10% of those
surveyed said they would return to their home provinces if they were
forced out of their present accommodation by demolition. More than 45%
said they would just move somewhere else around the capital. But most
likely it would have to be farther out. Beijing's registered residents
may notice that hiring good help is getting pricier. | 
