Beijing authorities think they have a solution to the swelling population of migrant workers encamped on the outskirts of the city: wall them out. Restricted access to some Beijing suburban villages may be extended to the whole city, the capital's party chief said after visiting a walled-off village on Saturday. Dashengzhuang, in Xihongmen town in Beijing's Daxing district, has guards at its entrance and people are only allowed in after showing a pass which includes the holder's name, sex, ethnic background, hometown, occupation, identity card number and mobile phone number. The village is closed between 11pm and 6am. 'The community-style village management is a positive and effective experiment in the process of urbanisation and co-ordination of urban and rural development,' Beijing Party Secretary Liu Qi told a seminar after a visit to Xihongmen, the Beijing Daily reported. He said the approach had improved village management and cut crime rates and would be promoted across the whole city. Public Security Minister Meng Jianzhu said a growing floating population had created many new problems for city management. Many villages swallowed up by Beijing's urban sprawl have floating populations, mainly migrant labourers, that outnumber the original residents, sometimes by 10 to one. The pilot scheme in Xihongmen was launched at a cost of 130 million yuan (HK$149.41 million) after 11 violent deaths in November and December in Daxing district villages, Xinhua's Oriental Outlook magazine reported. 'Seasonal migrant labourers, 90 per cent of whom are junior high school graduates, are very dangerous,' Chen Debao, chief of the Daxing public security branch, was quoted as saying. Ninety-two villages where floating populations outnumber original residents will join the scheme by the end of this year. Sixteen have already set up gates, fences and police boxes at village entrances. More surveillance cameras will be installed and hundreds of trained watchmen have been dispatched to work in local police stations, mainland media have reported. The scheme has sparked heated discussion among internet users, scholars and in the mainland and foreign media. Many people say the villages are more like prisons and the scheme is a form of discrimination against migrant workers. The Daxing government said participation was voluntary and each village could decide how 'closed' they wanted to be. Professor Lu Jiehua of Peking University's Institute of Population Research said the scheme indicated Beijing still had a long way to go to become a world-class city. 'It's the first time such an approach has been adopted for security reasons,' he said Beijing villages implemented similar temporary measures during the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, last year's 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic and this year's National People's Congress session. Laosanyu village party secretary Wang Changxiang told the New Century Weekly that village entry passes would help authorities gather information about the floating population. Outsiders could apply for a pass with a temporary residence certificate which required verification of the landlord's and tenant's ID cards. 'In this way, problematic people won't dare to apply for a pass,' he said. Professor Hu Xingdou, a Beijing Institute of Technology economist, said: 'Prison-style management will more or less improve social security in a few small areas, but it's not appropriate to expand to the whole city. 'Setting up fences and questioning outsiders is a kind of discrimination and cannot solve the problem fundamentally. It's a promotion of China's traditional 'fence culture'. Hukou (the permanent residency permits required on the mainland) is a part of it. It ... represents ... closed-mindedness and conservatism.'