Last days of village in ‘Silicon Valley’
Beijing: Surrounded by the sleek hi-tech campuses and luxury condominiums of “Beijing’s Silicon Valley”, migrants from the countryside recreate village life, cooking in outdoor communal areas, playing cards and showering in the street.
But their community’s days are numbered.
Demolition crews will soon arrive to flatten its alleys packed with dilapidated, one-room dwellings as part of a city-wide “clean-up” campaign.
For months, the authorities have bricked up and torn down thousands of shops and homes that are deemed to violate Beijing’s zoning laws as the government seeks to give the capital a facelift and limit the population to 23 million people by 2020.
Migrants from China’s relatively undeveloped southwestern region have lived precariously for two decades in Zhongguancun, which is also the base of hi-tech companies including Lenovo, Baidu, Tencent and Sohu, which help their own employees from other regions obtain legal rights to live in the capital.
Zhang Zhanrong, a woman in her early 30s, moved to Beijing from a remote village as a teenager to look for work.
She was following in the footsteps of her neighbours, who had sent word home to the rural outskirts of Chongqing that people earn much more in the capital.
They all settled in a plot of land in the northwest of the city, where they built common areas and piled their families into clusters of tiny apartments.
They call their adopted home Houchang Cun, which means “the village behind the factories”.
Zhongguancun has been a national base for the science and information technology industries since the 1980s.
“They don’t want migrants here anymore.
“We’re just ordinary rural people and we don’t try to understand the government policies.
“We haven’t found another place yet,” Zhang said stoically, standing while making dinner at an outdoor communal gas stove.
She and her husband recently took out a loan to purchase two moving trucks. They employ neighbourhood residents as movers, who earn around 5,000 yuan (RM3,188) a month, while Zhang and her husband together make over 15,000 yuan (RM9,565).
They earn more than the average income in Beijing’s private sector, but most of it goes towards paying off the loans and saving for their children’s education.
They pay 1,000 yuan (RM637) in rent per month for two adjacent rooms.
China has hundreds of million of migrants who have moved from the countryside to its towns and cities in recent decades to find work, their labour fuelling the country’s economic boom.
But many remain poorly paid and cannot afford to bring their children with them, instead leaving them behind to be looked after by relatives.
Houchang residents said they only heard about their pending evictions from property managers, and were not told why they are being kicked out.
“We do the jobs that many locals don’t want to do, such as sanitation and heavy labour,” said Peng Shuixian, a 30-year-old mother of two who works as a cleaner.
“But it is hard to stay. My kids couldn’t get into school here. Now they’re back in Chongqing with their grandparents.”
We’re just ordinary rural people and we don’t try to understand the government policies.
Zhang Zhanrong