Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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An extended Lunar New Year holiday provides people from the self-ruled island with the opportunity to rethink their careers as the death toll from the deadly infection continues to rise
Online poll finds 63 per cent of Taiwanese unwilling to return to mainland China over health concerns
Many Taiwanese are opting not to return to their jobs in mainland China because of the coronavirus epidemic. Photo: EPA-EFE
Taiwanese account manager Douglas Liu values his life more than his job, which is why he will be staying at home on Monday rather than going back to work in the mainland China city of Suzhou.
Liu returned to his home in Taipei on January 10 for an extended Lunar New Year
holiday – and to vote in the island’s presidential election – and planned to go back to work on February 1. But as the coronavirus epidemic worsened, the 45-year-old changed his plans.
“Last week, my company told me I should resume work on February 24, but after I argued in vain over the risk of returning to Suzhou, I tendered my resignation,” he said. “After all, my life is more important.”
Liu works for a firm that manufactures chest freezers for the mainland Chinese market.
“With more than 80 coronavirus infections in Suzhou and little sign of it subsiding, who knows what could happen to me if I return,” he said.
More than 78,700 people have contracted the virus since it was first detected in Wuhan, the capital of central China’s Hubei province, at the end of last year, and close to 2,500 have lost their lives to it.
As of Saturday, about 98 per cent of the infections and 99 per cent of the fatalities were in mainland China, two figures that have prompted many Taiwanese to rethink their employment plans.
According to a survey conducted last week by online recruitment agency 104 Job Bank, 63 per cent of Taiwanese with jobs on the mainland said they would not be returning to work after the extended Lunar New holiday. Before Wuhan was placed under lockdown on January 23 in a bid to contain the coronavirus outbreak, the figure was just 50 per cent.
“The intensification of the outbreak has created panic and insecurity for Taiwanese who work in mainland China and the lockdown of many cities has further discouraged them from returning to their jobs,” said Jason Chin, a senior vice-president at the recruitment agency.
Wuhan has been on lockdown since January 23. Photo: Reuters
Dozens of cities across China have introduced some form of restriction on the movement of residents, and several remain under total lockdown.
Chin said that the containment efforts had made it impossible for many companies to resume normal operations and provided a catalyst for Taiwanese workers to seek employment elsewhere.
“Taiwanese often to change jobs after the Lunar New Year, so the mainland government’s policy of delaying the resumption of regular business activities has given them more time to look for work outside mainland China,” he said.
Shannon Chiu is another Taiwanese who decided to call time on the mainland because of the coronavirus outbreak.
After two years working for an agricultural technology company in Zhengzhou, the capital of central China’s Henan province, she said she already had concerns about the standards of health care there.
“Being sick in Zhengzhou is a nightmare for Taiwanese because of the poor organisation and registration procedures,” she said.
“You either have to wait hours to see a doctor or go hospital-hopping in the hope of getting an appointment somewhere else.”
Chiu said she was still working in Zhengzhou after the outbreak had been reported in Wuhan – about 500km (310 miles) to the south – but no one in the city was wearing a face mask.
“I was lucky because I came back to Taiwan a week before the lockdown and my company allowed me to continue working from Taipei,” she said.
“Although I no longer enjoy the expatriate benefits, I feel a lot safer here because I don’t think I would survive if I was put in a mainland hospital because of Covid-19.”
MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines on Tuesday allowed Filipino workers to travel to Hong Kong and Macau, relaxing the travel ban it imposed on China and its special administrative regions to control the spread of the coronavirus.
The Philippines announced its decision before Hong Kong reported that a Filipina domestic helper became its 61st case of coronavirus in the country.
There are more than 180,000 Filipinos in Hong Kong, many working as helpers, according to the Philippines Labour Ministry.
The Philippines had imposed a travel ban on China and its special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau. It later included Taiwan in the ban, but lifted it a few days after.
There was no immediate comment from Philippine officials on how the latest development in Hong Kong will affect its decision to relax its travel restriction.
The Philippines also said it would allow foreign spouses or children of Filipinos and holders of diplomatic visas travelling from China, Macau and Hong Kong to enter the country but they will be subjected to a 14-day quarantine.
Initially, only Filipinos and holders of permanent resident visas travelling from these areas were allowed entry.
Recruiters have appealed to the government to exempt Filipino workers from the travel ban because many of them are breadwinners. They could also lose their visas if they failed to report for work on time, the Society of Hong Kong Accredited Recruiters of the Philippines has said.
In 2019, Filipino workers in Hong Kong sent home $801 million in foreign exchange remittances, central bank data showed.
Filipinos leaving for Hong Kong and Macau for study and employment will be required to sign a declaration that they know the risks of going there, health officials said.
The Philippine government also said it will repatriate Filipino crew and passengers from the quarantined cruise ship Diamond Princess who wish to come home.
The cruise ship, owned by Carnival Corp and carrying some 3,700 passengers and crew, has been quarantined in Yokohama since Feb. 3, after a man who disembarked in Hong Kong before it travelled to Japan was diagnosed with the virus.
The Philippine Foreign Ministry said 35 of the 538 Filipinos onboard had tested positive for the coronavirus, including the eight new cases, who are all crew members.
In the Philippines, there have been three confirmed cases of coronavirus, including one death.
BEIJING/SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China reported on Wednesday its smallest number of coronavirus cases since January, lending weight to a prediction by its top medical adviser for the outbreak to end by April, but a global infectious diseases expert warned of the spread elsewhere.
Financial markets took heart from the outlook of the Chinese official, epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, who said on Tuesday the number of new cases was falling in some provinces, and forecast the epidemic would peak this month, even as the death toll in China rose to more than 1,100 people.
World stocks, which had seen rounds of sell-offs over the virus, surged to record highs on hopes of a peak in cases. The Dow industrials, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all hit new highs, and Asian shares nudged higher on Wednesday.
But the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the epidemic poses a global threat akin to terrorism and one expert coordinating its response said while the outbreak may be peaking at its epicentre in China, it was likely to spread elsewhere in the world, where it had just begun.
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“It has spread to other places where it’s the beginning of the outbreak,” the official, Dale Fisher, head of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network coordinated by the WHO, said in an interview in Singapore.
“In Singapore, we are at the beginning of the outbreak.”
Singapore has reported 47 cases and worry about the spread is growing. Its biggest bank, DBS (DBSM.SI), evacuated 300 staff from its head office on Wednesday after a confirmed coronavirus case in the building.
Hundreds of cases have been reported in dozens of other countries and territories around the world, but only two people have died outside mainland China – one in Hong Kong and another in the Philippines.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday the world had to “wake up and consider this enemy virus as public enemy number one” and the first vaccine was 18 months away.
In China, total infections have hit 44,653, health officials said, including 2,015 new confirmed cases on Tuesday. That was the lowest daily rise in new cases since Jan. 30.
The number of deaths on the mainland rose by 97 to 1,113 by the end of Tuesday.
But doubts have been aired on social media about how reliable the figures are, after the government last week amended guidelines on the classification of cases.
‘STAY HOPEFUL’
The biggest cluster of cases outside China is aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined off Japan’s port of Yokohama, with about 3,700 people on board. Japanese officials on Wednesday said 39 more people had tested positive for the virus, taking the total to 175.
One of the new cases was a quarantine officer.
Thailand said it was barring passengers from another cruise ship, MS Westerdam, from disembarking, the latest country to turn it away amid fears of the coronavirus, despite no confirmed infections on board.
“We try to stay hopeful,” American passenger Angela Jones told Reuters in a video recording. “But each day, that becomes a little bit more difficult, when country after country rejects us.”
Echoing the comparison with the fight against terrorism, China’s state news agency Xinhua said late on Tuesday the epidemic was a “battle that has no gunpowder smoke but must be won”.
The epidemic was a big test of China’s governance and capabilities and some officials were still “dropping the ball” in places where it was most severe, it said, adding: “This is a wake-up call.”
The government of Hubei, the central province at the outbreak’s epicentre, dismissed the provincial health commission’s Communist Party boss, state media said on Tuesday, amid mounting public anger over the crisis.
China’s censors had allowed criticism of local officials but have begun cracking down on reporting of the outbreak, issuing reprimands to tech firms that gave free rein to online speech, Chinese journalists said.
The pathogen has been named COVID-19 – CO for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for the year it emerged. It is suspected to have come from a market that illegally traded wildlife in Hubei’s capital of Wuhan in December.
The city of 11 million people remains under virtual lockdown as part of China’s unprecedented measures to seal infected regions and limit transmission routes.
Travel restrictions that have paralysed the world’s second-biggest economy have left Wuhan and other Chinese cities resembling ghost towns.
Even if the epidemic ends soon, it has taken a toll of China’s economy, with companies laying off workers and needing loans running into billions of dollars to stay afloat. Supply chains for makers of items from cars to smartphones have broken down.
ANZ Bank said China’s first-quarter growth would probably slow to 3.2% to 4.0%, down from a projection of 5.0%.
The likely slowdown in China could shave 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points off both euro zone and British growth this year, credit rating agency S&P Global estimated.
XI’AN, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) — In the winter drizzle, a white control line model plane climbs, dives and turns. The flyer, Huang Jinquan, 11, has just won his first national title in August with a dazzling aerobatic performance.
Not keen to talk, the introverted champion prefers to show his passion with the two lines in his hands.
Jinquan is a student of Redian Primary School in the eastern suburbs of Xi’an, northwest China. More than 70 percent of the students at this school come from rural areas and have been taken to cities by their parents, who are migrant workers striving for a better life. Many, like Huang, lack a companion as their parents are usually busy with work, and model planes are too expensive for them.
Headmaster Han Baoan had a chance to receive flying training in 1983 when he first came to work in Redian. Since then he has been trying his best to help his students fly.
“We may not have enough money, but nothing can deprive us of passion for the sport,” he says.
The school managed to establish a model airplane club in 2012. The sport became more popular among Redian students when it was included in the program of the 2017 Chinese National Games. Now the club has 20 members and has won the national championships in two years in a row.
“Model planes are expensive. Many beginners in the more developed coastal provinces can afford serious competition models. They can buy new ones when they crash the models,” says Han. “We don’t have enough funding. Neither can we charge our students in the club. All we can do is to train harder than other teams.”
“But still, I’d like to help these children fly further and higher in their life,” Han says.
Han and other teachers bought components and made model planes themselves. They teach students take-off and landing and later flying stunts.
“A good flyer needs to practice for thousands of hours. For example, Huang has to finish more than 10 training sessions every week in order to better master the skills,” says Han.
The club renewed an air-raid shelter under the classroom building to store and fix models.
“We can fix up some small problems of the model airplanes such as a broken propeller or a broken landing gear,” says Jin Yuwei, who partnered Huang to snatch the first place of the Chinese Teenagers’ Model Airplane Competition.
The title was hard-earned. In the 2017 national competition, her plane accidentally crashed into Huang’s. The then eight-year-old girl burst into tears. After the failure, she trained even harder and now she can operate the plane better.
“I love the sport and my parents are all supportive. Since I began playing model planes I seldom play computer games or get up late at the weekend. The sport helps me to develop good habits,” Jin says.
Flying model airplanes also means more opportunities for these students. To promote the sport, the city government has launched a project in which schools like Redian can share local top schools’ funding and other resources on extra-curricular activities.
Jinquan’s sister Jinxia, who snatched the club’s first national title in 2018, was also recommended to study in one of the top middle schools in Xi’an.
Jinquan says he just wants to keep playing model airplanes, without elaborating on his future plan.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Port Talbot employs just under half of Tata’s 8,385 UK workforce
Tata Steel plans to cut as many as 3,000 jobs across its European business in another bid to come to terms with a “severe” international steel market.
The company wants to focus on higher-value products, it said, adding there would be no plant closures.
About two thirds of the job cuts will be office-based, it added.
The announcement comes after a merger with German rival Thyssenkrupp was blocked during the summer. Bosses had hoped the deal could reduce costs.
“Today we are highlighting important proposals towards building a financially strong and sustainable European business,” said Henrik Adam, chief executive of Tata Steel in Europe.
“We plan to change how we work together to enable better cooperation and faster decision-making. This will help us become self-sustaining and cash positive in the face of unprecedented severe market conditions, enabling us to lead the way towards a carbon-neutral future.”
The business employs about 20,000 people and is owned by India’s Tata.
Port Talbot steelworks employs just under half of Tata’s 8,385-strong workforce in the UK.
Wales’ economy minister Ken Skates said: “I am seeking an urgent conversation with Tata to establish what this means for workers in Wales and how we can support those affected by this announcement.”
It also said it would seek to “preserve thousands of jobs in a key foundation industry for the UK” but did not put a number on how many would be saved.
British Steel employs about 4,000 people in Scunthorpe and Teesside.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption China’s version of its past is a story of prosperity, progress and sacrifice for the common good
China’s extraordinary rise was a defining story of the 20th Century, but as it prepares to mark its 70th anniversary, the BBC’s John Sudworth in Beijing asks who has really won under the Communist Party’s rule.
Sitting at his desk in the Chinese city of Tianjin, Zhao Jingjia’s knife is tracing the contours of a face.
Cut by delicate cut, the form emerges – the unmistakable image of Mao Zedong, founder of modern China.
The retired oil engineer discovered his skill with a blade only in later life and now spends his days using the ancient art of paper cutting to glorify leaders and events from China’s communist history.
“I’m the same age as the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” he says. “I have deep feelings for my motherland, my people and my party.”
Image caption For people like Zhao Jingjia, China’s success outweighs the “mistakes” of its leaders
Born a few days before 1 October 1949 – the day the PRC was declared by Mao – Mr Zhao’s life has followed the dramatic contours of China’s development, through poverty, repression and the rise to prosperity.
Now, in his modest but comfortable apartment, his art is helping him make sense of one of the most tumultuous periods of human history.
“Wasn’t Mao a monster,” I ask, “responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen?”
“I lived through it,” he replies. “I can tell you that Chairman Mao did make some mistakes but they weren’t his alone.”
“I respect him from my heart. He achieved our nation’s liberation. Ordinary people cannot do such things.”
On Tuesday, China will present a similar, glorious rendering of its record to the world.
Beijing will tremble to the thunder of tanks, missile launchers and 15,000 marching soldiers, a projection of national power, wealth and status watched over by the current Communist Party leader, President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen Square.
An incomplete narrative of progress
Like Mr Zhao’s paper-cut portraits, we’re not meant to focus on the many individual scars made in the course of China’s modern history.
It is the end result that matters.
Image copyright XINHUA/AFPImage caption Mao Zedong pronounces the dawn of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949
And, on face value, the transformation has been extraordinary.
On 1 October 1949, Chairman Mao stood in Tiananmen Square urging a war-ravaged, semi-feudal state into a new era with a founding speech and a somewhat plodding parade that could muster only 17 planes for the flyby.
This week’s parade, in contrast, will reportedly feature the world’s longest range intercontinental nuclear missile and a supersonic spy-drone – the trophies of a prosperous, rising authoritarian superpower with a 400 million strong middle class.
It is a narrative of political and economic success that – while in large part true – is incomplete.
New visitors to China are often, rightly, awe-struck by the skyscraper-festooned, hi-tech megacities connected by brand new highways and the world’s largest high-speed rail network.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Those in China’s glittering cities may accept the trade-off of political freedom for economic growth
They see a rampant consumer society with the inhabitants enjoying the freedom and free time to shop for designer goods, to dine out and to surf the internet.
“How bad can it really be?” the onlookers ask, reflecting on the negative headlines they’ve read about China back home.
The answer, as in all societies, is that it depends very much on who you are.
Many of those in China’s major cities, for example, who have benefited from this explosion of material wealth and opportunity, are genuinely grateful and loyal.
In exchange for stability and growth, they may well accept – or at least tolerate – the lack of political freedom and the censorship that feature so often in the foreign media.
For them the parade could be viewed as a fitting tribute to a national success story that mirrors their own.
But in the carving out of a new China, the knife has cut long and deep.
The dead, the jailed and the marginalised
Mao’s man-made famine – a result of radical changes to agricultural systems – claimed tens of millions of lives and his Cultural Revolution killed hundreds of thousands more in a decade-long frenzy of violence and persecution, truths that are notably absent from Chinese textbooks.
Image copyright GETTY/TOPICALImage caption Tens of millions starved to death under Mao, as China radically restructured agriculture and society
After his death, the demographically calamitous One Child Policy brutalised millions over a 40-year period.
Still today, with its new Two Child Policy, the Party insists on violating that most intimate of rights – an individual’s choice over her fertility.
The list is long, with each category adding many thousands, at least, to the toll of those damaged or destroyed by one-party rule.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Beijing still regulates how many children families can have
There are the victims of religious repression, of local government land-grabs and of corruption.
There are the tens of millions of migrant workers, the backbone of China’s industrial success, who have long been shut out of the benefits of citizenship.
A strict residential permit system continues to deny them and their families the right to education or healthcare where they work.
And in recent years, there are the estimated one and a half million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang – Uighurs, Kazakhs and others – who have been placed in mass incarceration camps on the basis of their faith and ethnicity.
China continues to insist they are vocational schools, and that it is pioneering a new way of preventing domestic terrorism.
The stories of the dead, the jailed and the marginalised are always much more hidden than the stories of the assimilated and the successful.
Viewed from their perspective, the censorship of large parts of China’s recent history is not simply part of a grand bargain to be exchanged for stability and prosperity.
Getty
Timeline of modern China
1949 Mao declares the founding of the People’s Republic of China
1966-76 Cultural Revolution brings social and political upheaval
1977 Deng Xiaoping initiates major reforms of China’s economy
1989 Army crushes Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests
2010 China becomes the world’s second-largest economy
2018 Xi Jinping is cleared to be president for life
It is something that makes the silence of their suffering all the more difficult to penetrate.
It is the job of foreign journalists, of course, to try.
‘Falsified, faked and glorified’
But while censorship can shut people up, it cannot stop them remembering.
Prof Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is one of the few scholars left trying to record, via oral histories, some of the huge changes that have affected Chinese society over the past seven decades.
Her books are banned, her communications monitored and her social media accounts are regularly deleted.
“For several generations people have received a history that has been falsified, faked, glorified and whitewashed,” she tells me, despite having been warned not to talk to the foreign media ahead of the parade.
“I think it requires the entire nation to re-study and to reflect on history. Only if we do that can we ensure that these tragedies won’t be repeated.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Can progress really be attributed to the leadership?
A parade, she believes, that puts the Communist Party at the front and centre of the story, misses the real lesson, that China’s progress only began after Mao, when the party loosened its grip a bit.
“People are born to strive for a better, happier and more respectful life, aren’t they?” she asks me.
“If they are provided with a tiny little space, they’ll try to make a fortune and solve their survival problems. This shouldn’t be attributed to the leadership.”
‘Our happiness comes from hard work’
As if to prove the point about how the unsettled, censored pasts of authoritarian states continue to impact the present, the parade is for invited guests only.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Mao’s portrait will, as it always is, be watching over the events in Tiananmen Square
Another anniversary, of which Tiananmen Square is the centrepiece, is also being measured in multiples of 10 – it is 30 years since the bloody suppression of the pro-democracy protests that shook the foundations of Communist Party rule.
The troops will be marching – as they always do on these occasions – down the same avenue on which the students were gunned down.
The risk of even a lone protester using the parade to mark a piece of history that has largely been wiped from the record is just too great.
With central Beijing sealed off, ordinary people in whose honour it is supposedly being held, can only watch it on TV.
Back in his Tianjin apartment, Zhao Jingjia shows me the intricate detail of a series of scenes, each cut from a single piece of paper, depicting the “Long March”, a time of hardship and setback for the Communist Party long before it eventually swept to power.
“Our happiness nowadays comes from hard work,” he tells me.
It is a view that echoes that of the Chinese government which, like him, has at least acknowledged that Mao made mistakes while insisting they shouldn’t be dwelt on.
“As for the 70 years of China, it’s extraordinary,” he says. “It can be seen by all. Yesterday we sent two navigation satellites into space – all citizens can enjoy the convenience that these things bring us.”
Media caption What was China’s Cultural Revolution?
Security forces shown tackling ‘demonstrators’ wearing black shirts
‘Anti-mob’ tactics prepare forces for the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic
Shenzhen police broadcast live footage of a security exercise involving 12,000 officers rehearsing anti-riot drills. Photo: Weibo
More than 12,000 police officers assembled in Shenzhen in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Tuesday for a drill that included anti-riot measures similar to those seen on the streets of Hong Kong.
The drill was part of security preparations for the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, Shenzhen police said on the force’s Weibo newsfeed.
“A drill will be held to increase troop morale, practise and prepare for the security of celebrations, [and] maintain national political security and social stability,” police said.
China mobilises 190,000 police officers to prepare for 70th anniversary celebrations
In live videos of the police drills shown on the Yizhibo network, officers in body armour, helmets and shields confronted groups of people in black shirts and red or yellow construction safety helmets – similar to those worn by Hong Kong protesters – who were holding flags, banners, batons and wooden boards.
Global Times
✔@globaltimesnews
Shenzhen #police drill attracted unusual attention as it features scenarios that resemble the ongoing riots in #HongKong. #香港http://bit.ly/2YobnJc (Video: Shenzhen News Radio)
One of the banners read “return my hard-earned money” – a slogan often used by migrant workers in protest against unpaid salaries.
“The practice is complete with mature anti-mob tactics. The police forces can present an anti-mob formation, which is flexible, suitable for different situations, with accurate aim and effective control,” a narrator said during the live broadcast.
As the drill escalated and more “rioters” were deployed, police fired tear gas and smoke covered the training ground.
A few minutes later, the rioters fired home-made gas bombs then set bogies alight and drove them at the police lines. The officers changed formations and pressed the rioters, making arrests. Police handlers and their dogs were also on the scene.
A blazing bogie is driven towards police lines during Shenzhen police’s anti-riot exercise. Photo: Weibo
Other drills included anti-smuggling and search-and-rescue exercises involving personnel from the People’s Liberation Army.
The drill was presented as preparation for the 70th anniversary celebrations but it came amid continued violence in the streets of Hong Kong and two incidents of the Chinese national flag being thrown into Victoria Harbour.
Hong Kong has been engulfed in two months of turmoil stemming from opposition to the now-suspended extradition bill.
Police handlers and their dogs were deployed against people dressed like Hong Kong demonstrators. Photo: Weibo
“Is this hinting at Hong Kong?” a commenter on the Shenzhen police Weibo thread asked.
“We are doing drills today, and they can enter into real practice in Hong Kong in the future. We can send thousands of anti-mob squads over and strike hard at the radical traitors, those Hong Kong independence supporters,” another user said.
Since protests escalated in Hong Kong, Beijing has reiterated its “unflagging support” for embattled Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and her administration to take lawful action to restore order, and warned that the city was entering “a most dangerous phase” with violence on the streets.
Some 150,000 residents of Baishizhou have to leave by the end of September to make way for malls, hotels and high-end residential projects
They worry about finding affordable housing in the city, and their children’s education
Urban villages like Baishizhou provide affordable housing, mostly for migrant workers. Photo: Phoebe Zhang
As their eviction deadline nears, all Chen Jian can think about is the wrecking ball – and where his family is going to go. He often dreams about the negotiations – with officials, real estate developers, landlords. On other nights, he cannot sleep at all.
“I’m mostly worried about my daughter – she starts secondary school in September,” said Chen, 41, who works as a quality supervisor for a foreign trading company.
His family of four lives in a cheap one-bedroom flat in Baishizhou, one of the last standing chengzhongcun, or “urban villages”, in the flourishing commercial zones of southern Chinese city Shenzhen.
The villages provide affordable housing – costing from a few hundred to a few thousand yuan per month – to a mostly migrant worker population that provides services and labour.
But Baishizhou, in the Nanshan district, will not be standing for much longer. Many tenants in the area have received eviction notices since June, telling them to move out before the end of September to make way for a real estate project led by Shenzhen-based developer LVGEM Group.
The developer bought the land and buildings from their landlords, and it plans to knock them down and replace them with malls, hotels, high-end residential projects and skyscrapers.
Some 150,000 people are affected, mostly migrant workers, and they will have to find new homes, change jobs or even move back home at short notice.
Chen Jian lives in a one-bedroom flat in Baishizhou with his wife, daughter and son. Photo: Phoebe Zhang
For Chen and more than 2,000 other families, their children’s education is the most urgent issue. He said they could move somewhere else nearby, but the rent would be more than four times higher. A cheaper area would mean a long walk to school for his daughter from the nearest subway station.
As the breadwinner, Chen’s monthly income of 12,000 yuan (US$1,750) has to cover the whole family. His wife takes care of their three-year-old son and their daughter, 12.
“If I were here by myself, I would just pack up my bags and go,” said Chen, who moved to Shenzhen from Henan province. “But I can’t – I have children, I would do anything for my children.”
Families who’ve lived in old Chinese town for generations being kicked out to make way for tourists
Urban villages are a phenomenon that grew from China’s rapid development. In the 1980s, soon after Shenzhen became the country’s first special economic zone, the local government expropriated mostly vacant land from villagers and allowed developers to build commercial properties there.
The locals invested the large sums of money they received into new living spaces in their villages, which they rented out to the migrant workers that flowed into the city amid a manufacturing boom.
These chengzhongcun emerged as a tangle of damp alleyways, where electricity and telephone wires hang like spiderwebs. They bustle with fruit carts, soy milk shops, cobblers, karaoke parlours, short-stay love hotels and hair salons offering massage services. The “handshake buildings” where people live are packed together so tightly that residents could reach out of the window and shake their neighbour’s hand in the opposite flat.
“I call this ‘voluntary urbanisation’,” said Duan Peng, an architect based in the city. Since he moved to Shenzhen in 2001, Duan has spent many days and nights in Baishizhou. He said its development was in line with the government’s urban planning policy, since it allowed migrant workers to live in a relatively prosperous area in the city centre rather than on its periphery.
“Handshake buildings”, where residents can shake their neighbours’ hands through the windows, are a feature of China’s urban villages. Photo: Phoebe Zhang
Chen moved to Shenzhen with his wife in 2000, and both their children were born there. They moved to Baishizhou in 2008 after he was introduced to his landlord, who is from Chen’s hometown and rented him the flat for 650 yuan a month.
The rent has gone up by just 300 yuan in the 11 years they have lived there. They have watched as new developments sprang up around them – amusement parks, a golf course, malls and an area that is home to some of the country’s top tech companies including Huawei, Tencent and DJI.
How the eviction of Beijing’s migrant workers is tearing at the fabric of the city’s economy
But away from the shiny new developments, 150,000 migrant workers from all over the country are packed into 2,500 buildings in Baishizhou, where rents and services are affordable.
The urban village is full of people like Chen. Small business owner Wang Fang came to Shenzhen from northeast China in 2003 and has lived in Baishizhou ever since. Six months ago, she signed a three-year lease on a commercial space and opened a dumpling restaurant, but she is worried about the future.
“I can’t go back home, I already have a Shenzhen hukou,” she said, referring to the household registration document that gives access to public services. “I don’t have land there any more and can’t make a living there [as a farmer].”
She has not been told she has to leave the restaurant, but Wang and her two sons have until the end of September – when the building’s water and electricity will be cut off – to vacate their flat.
“It’s only a matter of time before the business is shut down as well,” she said.
Small shops and street vendors line Baishizhou’s bustling alleyways. Photo: Phoebe Zhang
According to an online poll of 1,031 Baishizhou residents this week, about half said they may have to find another job, and more than 600 were concerned about their children’s education. The survey, conducted by Shenzhen University urban planning professor Chen Zhu, also found that 70 per cent of those polled planned to find another flat in the city, while 28 per cent would leave.
Duan said the evictions and redevelopment would inevitably affect the surrounding areas, as well as the residents.
“The prices of services in the neighbourhood will increase, because many of the workers [now providing those services] will move far away, and rents will increase as well,” he said.
But for many such redevelopments, while the government, landlords and village officials might be consulted, the tenants are left out.
“Most of these residents, their voices and their interests aren’t on the negotiating table – their losses aren’t calculated in the real estate developer’s demolition costs,” Duan said.
A receptionist at LVGEM said he was not aware of any complaints about the redevelopment, while emails to the company went unanswered.
Meanwhile the developer’s partner, Baishizhou Corporation, told Southern Metropolis Daily it would provide legal services, rentals support and school buses for tenants who will be displaced.
But it is not enough for migrant workers like Chen. Like many of those facing eviction, he fears he will have to pay more rent, and there may not be a school bus service in his area.
He mentions a slogan plastered on walls in the city, “Once you come, you’re a Shenzhener” – part of a government campaign to lure talent and investors.
Chen said he worried that Shenzhen wanted only hi-tech workers and luxury residential compounds in the city, leaving little room for low-income workers.
“Despite what the slogan says, you ask yourself, are you really a Shenzhener?” he said.
GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) – At least 84 people have died from drinking toxic bootleg liquor in the northeastern Indian state of C, and around 200 others have been hospitalised, a state government minister said on Saturday.
The deaths come less than two weeks after more than 100 people died from drinking tainted alcohol in two northern Indian states, Uttarkhand and Uttar Pradesh.
Police have arrested twelve people in connection with making bootleg alcohol in Assam, a practice local politicians say is rampant in the area’s tea estates, where its is drunk by poorly-paid labourers after a tough day’s work in the plantations.
“Every 10 minutes we are getting reports of casualties from different places. So far about 200 people are in hospital with many of them critical,” Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told Reuters via telephone.
“Doctors from nearby districts and other medical colleges have been rushed in to deal with the crisis,” said Sarma, after visiting patients at Jorhat, located some 300 kilometres east of the state’s financial hub, Guwahati.
Deaths from illegally produced alcohol, known locally as hooch or country liquor, are common in India, where many cannot afford branded spirits.
The death tolls from the two recent incidents, however, are believed to be the deadliest since a similar case killed 172 in West Bengal in 2011.
Dilip Rajbnonshi, a doctor at the government hospital in Golaghat, located some 40 kilometres southwest of Jorhat said the deaths were due to “spurious country liquor”.
A number of women are among the casualties. Many of those that drank the liquor were tea plantation workers who had just received their weekly wages, according to another state government official.
“I asked some of the patients why they consume liquor almost everyday and they said after a hard day’s work in the plantations they drink to relieve stress and tiredness,” health minister Sarma said.
Mrinal Saikia, a local lawmaker from the Bharatiya Janata Party – which is in control of the federal and Assam state governments – said alcohol, often laced with cattle feed and battery acid, is being supplied “in gallons” to tea plantation workers.
“This is a big business in areas surrounding tea gardens where people set up illegal distilleries to make country liquor,” he said.
GUANGZHOU, Feb. 4 (Xinhua) — Migrant worker Liao Guiren was more than excited to take a bullet train on his Spring Festival journey back home, the first time for the middle-aged man.
Each year during the past two decades, the 45-year-old had to endure an exhausting eight-hour bus ride from his workplace in south China’s Guangdong Province to his hometown in the city of Guigang in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, for a large annual family gathering.
But this year, the bullet train cut his travel time to less than three and a half hours.
“The traffic jams on the roads during the holiday must be worse,” Liao said when having his ticket checked at the railway station in Guangdong’s Zhongshan. “The expressways back home must be more crowded than the railway station.”
Liao said it was no easy job to buy the bus ticket back home during the festival. “I used to line up for hours at the station for tickets, and the prices often ticked up due to high demand.”
However, it took Liao a couple of minutes to buy the train ticket back home on his smartphone this year.
Liao is among a growing number of Chinese travelers who have benefited from a more convenient and efficient way to return home during the Spring Festival travel rush in recent years.
It is estimated that the annual travel rush that lasts 40 days will see 413 million railway trips across the country, up 8.3 percent from the previous year.
To meet the growing demand, China has been expanding its railway network at an unprecedented pace for decades, with the total operational length of high-speed railways reaching 29,000 km by the end of last year.
One of the country’s major newly-built railways is the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link, which started service last year and links Hong Kong with more than 40 cities on the Chinese mainland via direct rail services.
“The railway makes it more convenient for those working in Hong Kong to return to the mainland for family gatherings,” said Siu Kin-Po, head of the Guangzhou center of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions.
SMARTER TRAVEL
Liao has taken trains several times, but it was his first time to use a self-service machine to check in at the railway station.
Liao followed the instructions on the machine that explicitly explains what to do.
He put both his ticket and ID card onto the slot of the machine and waited for the facial recognition system to identify his face before the gate opened to let him pass. The whole process took less than 10 seconds.
A total of 595 self-service check-in machines have been deployed at the railway stations in Guangdong, Hunan and Hainan to streamline the check-in process, according to China Railway Guangzhou Group Co. Ltd.
Other smart technologies such as virtual reality and smart navigation machines have also been used in Chinese railway stations to help travelers ease the pressure during the travel rush.
“Smart technologies have made the rail services more fun and convenient,” Liao said. “I want to take bullet train again next year when I go home.”
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 