New | Life in a Beijing satellite town: Elderly parents queue for hours at bus stations for commuter children

Every weekday before dawn in the remote Beijing satellite town of Yanjiao, Hebei province, more than a dozen elderly people stand shivering in the cold as they take the early spots in long queues at the bus station.

They are there to hold places in the queues for their children, commuters who use the extra time to sleep before catching the bus rides, which may take up to two hours depending on how bad the traffic is, to downtown Beijing and begin their working day.

Some elderly parents told China Youth Daily that they insist on doing this in spite of objections from their children.

Long queues forming before each dawn at bus stations have increasingly become a common scene in flourishing satellite towns surrounding the nation’s capital as a result of soaring housing prices in urban Beijing.

In the past year, the average housing prices in Yanjiao, which is 35 kilometres east of Beijing, has risen from 8,000 yuan (HK$10,100) to 9,400 yuan (HK$11,800) per square metre. However this is still less than half the prices of suburban areas in Beijing, and a far cry from a staggering 50,000 yuan-per-square-metre in the city centre.

Every day, some 300,000 commuters travel from Yanjiao to Beijing for work, and return home at the end of the day to sleep. This phenomenon has earned the town the nickname of “Sleeping Town”.