Beijing migrant worker evictions: the four-character word you can’t say anymore
As the Chinese capital sets about evicting workers unfortunately described as the ‘low-end population’, two cornerstones of the country’s economic miracle seem to have come head to head: real estate and cheap labour
In the end, those four characters had to go, never to be seen or mentioned again: di-duan-ren-kou, or “low-end population”. A cold bureaucratic definition of low value-added manual jobs that somehow expanded to designate the people who do those jobs, has caused as much heartburn as the harsh spectacle of Beijing’s ongoing eviction of the people who fit that description. The censors have now banned that word from social media and elsewhere.
In an angry WeChat post, the writer-filmmaker Xu Xing said: “Low-end population – who invented those four characters? I’m over 60 and I’ve never heard anything like that. When I was in Germany it was a crime to use this expression.”
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“Migrant workers do not read government documents, so they had no idea that this is what they were called,” says Professor Jiang, an academic who studies the new Chinese working class and prefers to be referred to only by his last name. “Now they have discovered that they are second-class citizens.”
It all began on November 18, when a fire killed 19 migrants in the village of Xinjiancun – part of the southern suburb of Daxing in Beijing. The Beijing government immediately ordered a 40-day campaign to demolish thousands of unauthorised houses in the city and evict the migrant workers occupying these rickety premises.
The execution has been rapid and clinically efficient, wiping out whole neighbourhoods. Xinjiancun has been razed. A textile factory worker points to the rubble, saying many of her colleagues once lived right there. “Now they are theoretically still working here but they have lost their homes and disappeared,” she says. “They have to find their own housing now.”