‘Silicon Valley’ clears villagers
Rural Chinese migrants to be pushed out by demolition crews
Surrounded by the sleek high-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 here in Zhongguancun. It is also the base of hightech 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 stylish woman in her early thirties, 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,” but no one knows why it was named that way because there are no factories nearby.
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,” Ms Zhang said.
Houchang residents said they only heard
about their pending evictions from property managers, and were not told why they are being kicked out.
“We work, we live day by day. Can’t talk about tomorrow,” said 50-year-old villager Lin Huiqing.