Campaign to Drive Out Migrants Slams Beijing’s Best and Brightest

Beijing
is a cultural, technological and commercial capital as well as a
political one, and the tenements on its outskirts are home to tens of
thousands of hopeful young college graduates who have moved here seeking
better jobs and better lives.

These
job seekers are treated as migrants in their own capital, because
China’s biggest cities are fortresses of official privilege, especially
Beijing. The government gives inhabitants who hold permanent residence
papers, called hukou, more generous access to housing, schools and
health care. But migrants must pay more for many services, and many live
on the edges of Beijing, where rents are lower.

Now
whole swaths of these neighborhoods have been emptied out and in many
cases reduced to rubble as the authorities condemn buildings as unsafe
or illegal and order migrants to leave.