Catherwood LibraryILR School

Chinese officials in Beijing have severely intensified efforts to evict working class Chinese migrant laborers from the country’s capital. Following a fire in a Beijing tenement building on November 18th which claimed the lives of 19 people according to Chinese journalists whose reports were censored by the national government, officials within Beijing’s Communist Party named safety as a top priority and commenced an aggressive campaign to close various apartment complexes throughout the city, primarily targeting the residences of migrant workers. These evictions have led to homelessness for a vast majority of these workers, who have no residency rights in Beijing and who are almost always living beneath the poverty line, with little to no resources in light of eviction. Although the Chinese government claims that the reasons for these evictions are safety concerns and infrastructure issues, many prominent Chinese intellectuals assert that these actions constitute human rights abuses and that the fire is pretext for kicking migrant laborers and those below the poverty line out of Beijing to make the city appear more attractive. Notwithstanding the level of censorship being applied to stories regarding the fire and popular protests and petitions against the evictions taking place, government officials have yet to comment on possible ulterior motives, holding that the government’s plans to shrink Beijing’s population by 2 million and current events are not correlated.