The great wall of Beijing: official plans to lock down whole city

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.