Dark side of ‘progress’ engulfs China’s ‘low-end’ folk

Thousands of poor people are being driven out of Beijing and other metropolitan areas.

Beijing’s authorities are driving the di duan, those perceived by the Communist Party leadership as “low-end people”, out of the city in a wintry blitzkrieg — an example being followed by China’s other main municipalities.

In the capital, tens of thousands are being given three days’ notice to leave their often flimsy housing. First water and power are cut, then many of the buildings are demolished by bulldozers as the residents flee, allowed to take only what they can carry. They have no new homes or jobs to go to. But they need to find shelter soon, for the temperature in the Beijing area this week has ranged between 3C and minus 6C. Huge piles of abandoned clothes, toys and other belongings that people have been forced to leave behind are dumped on the sides of streets. No compensation is provided for those ordered out of the city, in most cases people lacking a Beijing hukou, or registration certificate, entitling them access to public services.

Despite frequent statements through the years from the government about revising the hukou regulations, which tie such access to one’s birthplace to control mobility, little has changed since China’s imperial dynasties imposed the system.

About one-third of the 22 million inhabitants of Beijing lack a local hukou, and naturally wonder what’s coming next.

Videos shot on mobile phones by appalled sympathisers with the di duan have appeared briefly online — before being wiped by censors — showing security workers and police smashing their way into buildings and forcing out the inhabitants, most of them migrant workers, some of whom have lived in Beijing for a long time.

This purge — which has shocked many Beijingers — started with a fire in a grim two-storey building in Daxing, a district in the south of the city, that killed 19, including two children.

Cai Qi, Beijing’s party secretary and thus city boss, responded by swiftly launching a 40-day special operation to drive out low-income workers and small-business people. The ambition is to remove hundreds of thousands.

The terrible fire was clearly just a catalyst for the clear-out that it triggered. And the blame for such events in China can often be traced back to local officials being paid to turn a blind eye to exploiters’ disregard for safety.

Cai was appointed six months ago by President Xi Jinping as one of his closest lieutenants, having worked alongside him in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. He was one of the first officials to declare publicly his “absolute loyalty” to Xi, and was promoted to China’s 25-member Politburo at the recent party congress.

The thinking behind this purge of the poor was not, in its origins, all bad. The idea was to place a cap on the expansion of megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chongqing, and instead to develop the capacity of what are known as second-tier or third-tier cities to absorb the surplus labour still migrating to urban areas from the countryside, where 600 million or so people live.

Xi has strongly endorsed this concept, with an added twist that he wants central Beijing to be refocused on the top national party and state bodies, while state-owned enterprises, universities, hospitals and other institutions shift to Xiongan, a new city he has ordered built in neighbouring Hebei province, and the Beijing administration moves its infrastructure to Tongzhou, on the capital’s eastern outskirts.

But typically, in a centrally driven, unaccountable polity such as China’s, each layer of authority doubles down on what it presumes would attract the favourable attention of the big chief. And they don’t come bigger than Xi, the most powerful figure, next to Mao Zedong, the party has produced in its 96 years.

That means acting fast and acting on a big scale because there is likely to be no constraint.

The comparatively clear blue skies Beijing has experienced at the onset of winter is another case of good intentions with grim collateral consequences: no one is allowed to use coal for heating. That’s fine if you live in the city in centrally heated flats, but in the countryside beyond large numbers are shivering because they have no alternative — and village schoolchildren wear multiple layers in freezing classrooms.

The 89 million members of the party that Xi heads, however, are overwhelmingly “high-end people”. At the recent five-yearly national party congress, two-thirds of the delegates were full-time party officials, people for whom the state provides completely. Many effectively inherit their party memberships. Their families are “red”, and these days often rich. They have, as Xi says of himself, “red genes”.

The gap with those struggling to survive on the edges of China’s prosperity is widening — a fact recognised by Xi, in his 3½-hour speech to the party congress, as a notable “contradiction” in the nation today.

The “low-end people” have even less prospect of buying their own homes than their Australian equivalents. An average flat in a large Chinese city such as Beijing sells for about 45 times the average annual household income, more than three times the proportion in Sydney, where real estate is widely considered to be expensive.

The expulsion of these folk began months ago in Beijing, with street traders and food stall merchants swept away, and small stores, hairdressers, restaurants and other owner-operated businesses demolished — again without compensation — leaving the city’s residents, not all yet appropriately “high-end”, to order goods and services online or to visit glossy malls.

The middle class won’t easily replace the construction workers, tradesmen, security guards, couriers, caretakers, housemaids, nannies, restaurant owners and waiters who are being driven out. Many Beijingers have expressed their concern about the wave of evictions.

Peking University law professor He Weifang says: “The development and flourishing of Beijing over the past 10 years is utterly inseparable from the hard work done by outsiders and their low-paid contributions.”

A hundred other intellectuals, in an open letter to Xi, called for a halt to this “vicious conduct that breaks the law and the constitution, and seriously tramples human rights”. Local, and often very small, non-governmental organisations that have sought to help migrant workers — for instance, by storing their belongings, or providing them with some free services including recreation — also have been targeted and instructed to desist.

Naturally, many good things also happen in China. But this week’s events in Beijing raise questions about the cost of unconstrained “progress”.

In Australia, such events appear to attract little interest.

The shocking death in detention of Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and the continuing house arrest of his widow Liu Xia, the jailing for “subverting the state” of many human rights lawyers among the 250 rounded up in nationwide raids two years ago, guilty of defending “low-end people” and independent-spirited writers and intellectuals, seem of only slight, if any, concern to Australian rights activists.

Perhaps this is because Westerners continue to believe that “progress” is somehow destiny, that darkness cannot return, that places that become more materially modern must therefore become more “like us”.

Some may also believe in the power of names — if a party continues to call itself communist, it must be on the side of the marginalised, even of the angels. The “low-end” folk banished from Beijing this week may beg to differ.