rufina_w's Xanga

No place to call home

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 17:54:26 GMT

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.

Beijing Olympics & housing rights

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 13:07:42 GMT

Some 1.5 million Chinese have been forced from their homes during preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions said Tuesday.

China rejected the figures as groundless and said some 6,000 families had been compensated and properly resettled.

"Our research shows that little has changed since 1988 when 720,000 people were forcibly displaced in Seoul, South Korea, in preparation for the Summer Olympic Games," said Jean du Plessis, COHRE's executive director. "It is shocking and entirely unacceptable that 1.25 million people have already been displaced in Beijing."
Some 6,037 households have been demolished since 2002 to make way for nine venues in preparation for the Beijing Games, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.
[from courant.com]

Factsheets and other information can be downloaded from Centre On Housing Rights and Evictions

Beijing standard - an example

Fri, 25 May 2007 11:17:40 GMT

[source: brezhnev.net]

Qualifiers like 'excellent', 'good', 'moderate', etc, take on different meanings depending on where you are. Just for an example, take a look at the above chart, comparing the air pollution indexes between Hong Kong and Beijing. HK's 'HIGH' = BJ's 'GOOD' HK's 'VERY HIGH' = BJ'S 'SLIGHTLY POLLUTED'. So misleading!

More on Beijing's big clean up

Sun, 20 May 2007 17:15:33 GMT

From the New Zealand Herald:
No Olympic dream for Beijing's poor

"In a city of glittering skyscrapers, the shanty towns are inconvenient reminders of grinding poverty in China's heartland."

Advertisements = threat to China's "harmonious society"

Sun, 20 May 2007 17:00:52 GMT

One of the greatest source of amusement for Beijing visitors is the exaggerated language used in Chinese advertisements. They are often badly translated, mis-understood Western concepts, and at times, simply bizarre. In a recent China Daily article, Beijing authorities are policing the content of real estate advertisements, deeming the ads "offend socialist values and threaten 'social harmony' in the 2008 Olympic host city."

The above Chinese advertisement says "Be a foreigner's landlord!"
[Source: China Machete]

Rooftop Shanties

Wed, 16 May 2007 08:01:08 GMT

Rooftop shanties = Inverse of Beijing's underground

I recently returned from an amazing conference on Asian urbanism at Hong Kong's Baptist University. Entitled " The Transforming Asian City: Innovative Urban and Planning Practices", the conference gathered more than 25 speakers from 15 different countries to share their recent projects and research findings. Informality seems to be a recurring theme among the diverse range of papers presented.

Talking to Oren Yiftachel, a professor from Israel, led me to discover another form of informal settlement that shares some of the qualities of Beijing's underground hostels: rooftop shanties. Like Beijing's underground spaces, rooftop shanties form a dispersed layer, blanketing the city. Their survival from city authorities is hinged upon their invisibility. I haven't looked into them in depth, but rooftop shanties are common in Cairo and Hong Kong, two cities that also experienced a huge influx of migrants in the past two decades.

A Clean 2008 Olympics

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 13:55:08 GMT

Every effort is being made by everyone in Beijing to ensure that the city will be impeccably clean, ie. no spitting, no littering, no unhygienic street foods, no smelly public washrooms, no beggars on the streets, and now - no flies! A retiree in Beijing is offering to buy flies for 30 cents each, in an attempt to eradicate the annoying pests for 2008.

Friday, March 23, 2007

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:25:23 GMT

Came across this from a Chinese blogger:

¬K¹B¶}©l¤F (The Spring Festival move has began)

¹³©¹¦~¤@¼Ë (Like the years before)
§Ú¶HµLÀY»aÃÇ¤@¼Ë¨ì³B§ä¤H¶R²¼ (I run around like a head-less fly searching for tickets)

¬K¸`¦^®a¬Ý¬Ý (To go home for Spring Festival)
¤@¥ó¦h¤\·ÅÄÉªº¨Æ (Such a heartwarming event)
¦ý¤°¤\ì¦]§â³o¼Ë¤@¥ó·ÅÄÉªº¨ÆÅÜ±o¨º¤\³Â·Ð (But for what reason this has turned into such a burden)

§ÚÌ¦bÉÝ¶m¥Í¬¡¡B¤u§@¡B¥æµ|¡BÅÊ·R¡B¥Í¯f¡B¦Ñ¦º¡K (We live, work, pay taxes, fall in love, fall ill, die in a foreign place...)
¦ý³oÓ°ê®a¦}¤£»{¥i§ÚÌªºÉ²È (But this country does not recognize our value)
§ÚÌ¬O¡§¬y°Ê¤H¤f¡¨ (We are the "floating population")

¹³§Ú³o¼Ëªº¡§¬y°Ê¤H¤f¡¨¥þ¤¤°ê¤£ª¾¹D¦³¦h¤ÖÉE (Don't know how many tens of thousands of people like us in China)
§Ö¨ì¬K¸`¤F (It is almost Spring Festival)
§ÚÌ³£¦b¸ô¤W (We are all on the road)
±q§O¤Hªº¦a¤è¡A¦^¦Û¤vªº®a¶m (Returning to our homes from other people's places)

Quote of the day

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 01:50:47 GMT

In context of China's accelerated transformation...

"We need an architecture that rejects momentariness, speed and fashion; instead of accelerating change and a sense of uncertainty architecture must slow down our experience of reality in order to create an experiential background for grasping and understanding change. Instead of current obsession with novelty, architecture must acknowledge and respond to the bio-cultural and archaic dimensions of the human psyche."

Six themes for the next millenium - architecture for improving humanity
Juhani Pallasmaa

A Floating Bed

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:01:34 GMT

From Lago Studio