http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/inside-chinas-gated-communities-for-the-poor/article1644361/ --------------------------------snip Now China is gating off low-income villages, where migrant labourers from the countryside (the people who built those expansive villas) live in near squalor. The newly erected fences and nighttime curfews are designed to hold in the residents, and the criminality that supposedly emanates from these communities. “Enhance the idea of safety and reduce illegal crimes,” reads a red banner hanging over the main road to one such village south of Beijing, home to some 7,000 migrants
That road into Shoubaozhuang is guarded 24 hours a day by two uniformed guards and partially barred by an accordion gate that closes tight at 11 p.m. each night. Until 6 a.m. the next day, the residents are sealed in. Only those with passes are allowed to come and go, their movements recorded by a video camera stationed over the entrance. It’s one of 16 villages around Beijing that for the past two months have been locked down at night, under a program local authorities call “sealed management.” They say the aim is to get a better handle on the millions of migrant workers who have moved to the Chinese capital in search of work, and who often end up living in poor, dirty and rapidly growing places like the villages south of Beijing, some of which have seen their population grow tenfold in recent years. Another aim is to curb the rising crime in Beijing and other big cities, which is frequently blamed on the influx of migrant workers. Violent crime in the country rose 10 per cent last year, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which has also highlighted the dangerous and widening gap between increasingly well-off urban population, and the hundreds of millions of migrant workers and rural residents who live in and around the cities in poverty. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
