Advertisement
Advertisement

The new untouchables

It is Saturday evening around 6 o'clock and the underpass beneath Jianguomenwai Street is humming with activity as more than a dozen beggars prepare for a night's work on the cold Beijing streets.

A man with no legs sits on the freezing ground, the stumps wrapped in white gauze. Two small boys huddle together for warmth against the wall, while a few feet away an old man is asleep under a pile of rags and newspapers.

On the steps an old farmer and his wife eat from a discarded food container. At the top of the steps a toddler has wrapped herself around the leg of a westerner, pleading with a smile, 'Give maney ba, give maney ba!' The foreigner tries to shake her off, but after a few minutes reaches into his pocket and buys his leg back with a one yuan note.

Beggars have been a part of China's urban scenery for years, but since the summer an army of beggars has descended upon city streets, rekindling images of pre-liberation China. Ironically, the phenomenon is partially due to a recent change in mainland law that some hailed as a step forward in the protection of human rights and the promotion of legal reform.

Most beggars know the story of Sun Zhigang, a young graphic designer who was beaten to death by fellow inmates after he was detained by police in Guangzhou. Sun's crime was not being able to present a residency permit when stopped in the street. The death led to a public outcry and to the scrapping of the two-decade-old Measures for the Internment of and Deportation of Urban Vagrants and Beggars. Xinhua hailed the reform as a step forward.

'Replacing the forced repatriation system with the voluntary system is a major development of democracy and legal construction in China,' Xinhua reported. 'It's a pivotal reform of China's social welfare system.'

Critics, however, say the well-intentioned reform is responsible for a breakdown in social order and the sudden rise in the number of children and handicapped people - some displaying disabilities too sad to describe - on city streets. Many appear to be manipulated by healthy adults. The majority of beggars interviewed in the capital over the past four months say they are aware that the vagrancy law has been abolished.

'They know the police can't touch them any more,' says a Shandong farmer selling DVDs on the street, who says he has stayed at small hotels with groups of beggars. The change in the law was accompanied by the establishment of shelters for the homeless around the country that were supposed to take the beggars off the streets. The problem is that the shelters have attracted few takers.

Government officials point to the lack of information about shelters, but anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. The director of one centre said he had distributed cards with phone numbers and addresses into the hands of vagrants, but few showed up at the doors. In December, Sichuan University students disseminated information about the shelters. The students were disappointed, however, when not one of the 10 vagrants they spoke to was willing to go to a shelter.

An investigation by the Harbin city government found that fewer than 10 of every 100 beggars were on the street because of poverty. The survey determined that the majority had turned to begging as a means of work. Meanwhile, some of those who are asking for help are being turned away because they cannot meet the conditions for assistance.

'The help shelter wouldn't accept me,' says a 30-something woman from Shandong with a small girl standing in front of a Beijing restaurant that caters to foreigners. 'They said, 'you're healthy, you can work'.'

She says she and her five-year-old daughter make 30 yuan a day, spending six yuan on food. They sleep in an abandoned building. 'I pay no rent, but it's very cold,' says the woman, whose several layers of clothes make her look like a mummy.

'The homeless shelter?' snarls the man with no legs in the Jianguomenwai underpass. 'What's the use of that? It's only temporary - you can only stay 10 days.'

Some say begging has become the latest growth sector in the mainland job market. Or, as the Southern Metropolitan News put it, 'a path to riches'. It is said some beggars can earn as much as 200 yuan a day. Beggars in Beijing, who appear reluctant to admit they are doing well, say they earn about 20 to 60 yuan a day, no small sum in a country where monthly per capita income of rural residents stood at about 200 yuan last year.

The occupation is so lucrative, it is said, that Shangqiu county in Henan province became a professional beggars' town. Stories are recounted about the alleged wealth of Shangqiu, where new houses are going up rapidly.

A surprising number of beggars in Beijing say they are from Shangqiu - almost half of those interviewed - but to be fair the area was hit hard by flooding in the summer and autumn.

The most disturbing aspect is the rise in the number of adults controlling bands of very young children. They can often be seen sitting off to the side or making occasional appearances to pick up money and food collected by their 'employees'.

One small boy at the Beijing railway station says he turns his money over to his da ge, or elder brother, a euphemism for a gang leader.

A police officer said many children were 'remote controlled' by adults, who took all of the money they pulled in. The DVD peddler says the organisers are extremely tight-lipped, but that one leader confided that he controlled several children and that 200 yuan was sent to the parents of rented children each month. He says begging 'is not as pure as before'.

'Some of the kids are tricked, some are bought and some are rented from their parents,' he says.

Child trafficking has become a serious problem in China. In March, police stopped a bus heading from Guangxi province to Anhui for a routine inspection. When suitcases were opened, police found infants packed inside. According to reports, 19 passengers were discovered transporting 28 female infants aged two to five months, two to three babies packed in each suitcase.

One girl had suffocated.

The police say there are too many homeless children to do deal with, and that there is nowhere to put them. The Ministry of Civil Affairs says 150,000 homeless children under the age of 16 have been roaming the country for the past three years. Experts say the figure is much higher. With just 128 children's shelters on the mainland, even the conservative estimate would overwhelm these centres.

In the meantime, anger is mounting as newspapers report increased crime amid a rising tide of vagrants flooding the cities. Police are openly unhappy with their inability to detain vagrants. Yu Xingguo, Shenzhen's deputy police chief, told reporters that the scrapping of the vagrant detention law was one reason for the recent surge in crime in the city.

One newspaper reported: 'For the vast majority of people begging on the streets, begging is no longer a means of scraping by ... it has become a means of livelihood, like doing labour or working the fields.'

Unfortunately, sympathy is flagging. 'They have more money than us,' says a Beijing housewife, berating a foreigner for giving money to a small child. 'They're even building new houses back home.'

Local officials also appear to be losing patience. Some cities are considering putting certain areas off limits to beggars; Beijing has already banned them from working in the subway.

The central government and the media, however, have adopted a surprisingly humanistic approach. Yang Xianyin, Vice-Minister of Civil Affairs, told the Chinese media that begging 'is a kind of freedom. What's more important than a person's right to exist?'

A commentator in the Yangcheng Evening News said moving beggars out of certain areas was 'obviously not a measure that a fair society should adopt'. A reporter wrote in Southern Metropolitan Daily: 'Although these people are vagrants and beggars, they are still citizens of the country.'

Post