Many migrant workers among dead in Beijing fire, officials say

Chris Buckley BEIJING — A blaze roared through an apartment build- ing on the blue-collar edge of Beijing, killing at least 19 people, many of whom were apparently migrant workers from the Chinese country- side who were trapped in acrid smoke, officials and local residents said Sunday.

The fire broke out Saturday evening in a two-story struc- ture in the Daxing District, about 11 miles south of the Chinese capital’s prosperous downtown. Around 6 p.m., the flames began consuming the building, and thick smoke spilled into the air. Firefighters spent three hours battling the fire, according to a news release from Daxing officials.

Eight people were injured, and a “suspect” was being detained, the statement said. The release did not say whether the person had been accused of deliberately starting the fire or of negligence.

Residents who gathered near the gutted structure Sunday said the smoke from the fire had been thick and smelled of chemicals. They declined to give their names, apparently wary of speaking freely in front of police and officials who were watching the crowd and preventing people, including reporters, from getting within a few hundred yards of the site.

Police have not released information about the peo- ple who died in the fire, and officials said they had no information. But many, if not all, of the victims were likely to be migrant workers who had worked or lived in the cramped, inexpensive rooms of the building.

The deaths were a jarring reminder that Beijing is a city divided between its wealthy, well-guarded core and poorer, scrappier outskirts.

Downtown Be i jing is crowded with new skyscrapers, shopping malls and wealthier middle-class residents. This was the side of the city on show last month, when a Communist Party congress in the Great Hall of the People appointed President Xi Jinping as party leader for five more years.

But many menial workers who keep the Chinese capital going — cleaners, couriers, factory workers, stall owners — are migrants from villages who live on the fringes of the city because of high housing prices and government policies that have been forcing them out of downtown.

Xihongmen Town, the area in Daxing where the fire broke out, is a patchwork of roughly built houses and apartments, garment workshops and factories. It has an estimated 175,000 inhabitants, and about 150,000 of them are migrants from other parts of China, according to government statistics.

In 2011, a fire in a clothing factory in southern Beijing killed at least 17 people.