Housing official admits Beijing evicted 15,000 in path of Games

Just under 15,000 Beijing residents have been relocated to make way for Olympic venues, one of the city's top housing officials admitted yesterday.

But in its first detailed statement on the casualties of the city's massive redevelopment to meet Olympic standards, the Beijing municipal government also claimed that all those who had sacrificed their homes for the Games were adequately compensated in either cash or big discounts on new apartments.

Zhang Jiaming, vice-director of the Beijing Municipal Construction Committee, said yesterday that only 14,901 residents in 6,307 households had relinquished their homes to make way for the construction of 31 venues in the capital.

One-third of the stadiums were built from scratch. The rest involved renovations or expansions of existing facilities.

Mr Zhang's count was well below the calculations made last year by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) which claimed that up to 1.5 million Beijingers would be evicted from their homes in the run-up to the Games, often in a brutal and arbitrary manner with little compensation.

He said the official total did not include homes demolished in pre-Games facelift projects, an element factored into COHRE's estimate.

Mr Zhang also said that the relocation programme, which started in 2002, had run smoothly.