No toilets, water or heating ... China’s migrants still living on margins despite promise of reform
Domestic migrants in big Chinese cities have to share public loos, buy their own drinking water and burn coal to keep warm, and the authorities are rolling out a campaign to drive them out of the capital
Qi Shumin has been living in the capital of his own country for more than 10 years but is still treated like an illegal immigrant in a foreign land, with little access to the city’s public services.
Categorised as a peasant in mainland China’s household registration system, Qi, who makes a living selling breakfasts in a northern suburb of Beijing, is one of 270 million migrant workers who have contributed to China’s economic prosperity but are shut out of the country’s economic boom.
His family lives in two-room, temporary shelter in a compound behind a beer factory in the suburbs that stretch out beyond the capital’s North Fifth Ring Road. They have to burn coal in winter to keep warm as there’s no municipal heating system, have to share public toilets with their neighbours and have to buy water to drink.
“The water from the well is polluted, and we just use the water to wash dishes and clothes,” said Qi’s sister-in-law, doing the laundry in an alleyway less than two metres wide between two rows of bungalows.
They pay 1,600 yuan a month in rent and have no washing machine or television set, partly because they’re trying to save money and partly because their shelter could be demolished at any given moment.
The compound is facing demolition in the next few years to make way for one of the stations on a new railway line that will connect Beijing and the Hebei city of Zhangjiakou, 160km to the northwest, when they jointly host the Winter Olympics in 2022.