Closing the gate on floating population

Her name, photo, gender, ethnicity, hometown, occupation, identity card number and mobile phone number are all on the pass. The security guard had stopped Gao Xiaomei at the village entrance and asked to see the new pass before she was allowed to go home to her eight square metre room, for which she pays 200 yuan (HK$229) a month. 'I felt uncomfortable being stopped and checked at first,' Gao said, 'but later I sort of got used to it.' A clothes shop vendor who commutes six days a week, Gao, 22, has had to show the pass since April when Daxing district police in Beijing converted Laosanyu village, one of 16 pilot villages in Xihongmen town, into a gated community. 'I am not checked every time, as some guards sort of know I live there,' she said. A main gate of iron bars with an electric barrier is supplemented by two uniformed security guards. Staff in a patrol office by the entrance also watch people entering. A sign that reads 'Opens at 6am and closes at 11pm' hangs on the right gate. Laosanyu, with more than seven hectares of residential area and 66 hectares of fields, is known as 'a village of petitioners', people who come to Beijing to petition senior officials when they feel local governments have failed to meet their needs. It is located in the city's south on the Fifth Ring Road, about half an hour's drive from central Beijing. A cold dish vendor in Laosanyu said some petitioners used to buy dishes from her, but lately it had been rare to see anyone. Petitioners used to account for 70 per cent of the village's floating population during peak sensitivity periods, according to domestic media. Laosanyu's floating population was now more than 6,300 people, outnumbering the 660 residents almost 10 to one, village Communist Party secretary Wang Changxiang said. Locals live off the rent floaters pay rather than by farming. The village had spent about 500,000 yuan to beef up security, including hiring and training guards to work around the clock, building walls and 13 entry gates and setting up police boxes, Wang said. The Xihongmen government subsidised part of the cost to install a surveillance system with 15 cameras. The monitoring system is linked to the local police station. Wall segments totalling 150 metres were scattered around the village to block a number of small alley entrances. The cameras are placed along a main road about 500 metres long, other main alleys and junctions, as well as places near the gates. 'We don't have enough cameras,' said Kong Qingming, chief of the village security patrol. 'There are some problematic areas that haven't been covered yet. I will suggest installing more cameras.' Small shops and vendors are clustered along the main road, which is packed between 5pm and 8pm, when residents return to the village. The new measures do not appear to bother most residents. A cold dish vendor said business remained the same after the measures were adopted and her family was just scraping by after paying 1,000 yuan a month to rent three rooms. The number of petitioners in Laosanyu had dramatically dropped compared with last year, Wang said. 'Petitioners are about 2 to 3 per cent of the floating population,' he said, disagreeing that petitioners used to account for 70 per cent. 'These petitioners usually are mentally problematic,' Kong said in an interview with qq.com. 'They contribute to social instability. I have been dealing with them for three years and they seem to be hostile towards society. We are basically blocking them out. It's not discrimination. We just don't welcome them. They sometimes steal stuff and they can live anywhere. They are constantly looking for problems. Their moral standards are too low and we forbid them to enter our village.' It is now almost impossible for petitioners to get entry passes because they usually do not have temporary residence certificates. 'It's not like a prison, as online media says,' Kong said. 'If visitors can say the name of the friend they are going to see and we verify it by speaking with the friend, it's impossible to block them. We don't have the right to deny access. Actually in practice, it's impossible to check every single person. We are usually more careful with suspicious people carrying bags and riding tricycles.' Shoubaozhuang village, 50 metres diagonally across the road from Laosanyu, is stricter about strangers, who are not allowed in unless they show their passes or say who they have come to see. Sometimes the visitors are verified by phone. Shoubaozhuang, Laosanyu and 14 other villages are in the high-security pilot scheme, and 92 more are expected to join by the end of the year. Beijing will urbanise 50 key villages this year, according to the Ministry of Construction. 'As the city transforms ... into a world-class city, the widening income gap between urban and rural areas has given rise to more conflicts in the 753 kilometre area in Beijing,' a statement on the ministry's website says. When Beijing party secretary Liu Qi visited one of the pilot villages recently, he said 'community-style village management' was a move to cut crime, a positive and effective experiment in urbanising and co-ordinating urban and rural development, and added that it would be promoted across the whole city. It was in the wake of that urban and rural development that Professor Lu Jiehua of Peking University's Institute of Population Research introduced the concept of tightened management. 'Led by the Public Security Bureau, it's a bid to maintain the social order,' Lu said, but he saw a downside: 'Locals and outsiders are treated in a different way, which is not a very humane way of management.' Tang Jun , a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Social Policy, went even further, saying the measures created a feeling of terror and nervousness. 'The opinions of migrant people should be respected as they share the same village with locals,' he said. 'It's more reasonable to take the decision after soliciting views from both locals and outsiders.' A number of petitioners told domestic media they believed the tightened controls targeted them. One told Democracy and Law News the number of petitioners among the floating people in Laosanyu had plummeted by more than half. 'Citizens including the floating population and petitioners should be entitled to freedom to migrate wherever they like,' Professor Hu Xingdou of the Beijing Institute of Technology said. 'It's against the tide of history to blockade them, restrict their stay, inspect them in the streets and send them to labour camps or mental hospitals, which is harmful to social harmony.' Beijing has a substantial influx of migrants, as do Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. More than one-third of the population of Beijing and Shanghai is made up of such floaters, while Shenzhen has reached 85 per cent and Guangzhou almost half, domestic media has reported. As Beijing experiments, experts and internet users are speculating on whether it is setting a model for other cities with big floating populations. The scheme may be work temporarily in certain places, they say, but it's not suitable for a larger place. 'It won't solve any problems and is not worth adopting across the city or in other cities,' Hu said. Outsiders could apply for a pass with a temporary residence certificate that required verification of the landlord's and tenant's ID cards. 'In this way, problematic people won't dare to apply for a pass,' said Wang, Laosanyu's party secretary. 'It's ridiculous to make a village like a big prison. It violates basic human rights,' said sociologist Zhou Xiaozheng , a professor at Renmin University. 'People should have freedom of movement. This measure is going backwards.' Laosanyu rents had risen because of the drop in crime, Wang said. But Gao Xiaomei seems happy. Her rent has not yet gone up. 'The current management is good, and I feel safe,' she said.