Daxing District to become a collection of gated communities

Beijing Morning Post, April 26, 2010

On the sidebar of today’s Beijing Morning Post is a headline for a story about a pilot program to keep villages safe from the crime brought by floating populations:

Walls have been erected to block the roads and seal off paths into the town. Cameras have been installed, and passes are checked before any car or pedestrian is allowed inside. Yesterday morning, Beijing police rolled out a “closed village” management model in sixteen villages in the area of Jinxing in Daxing District. This reporter learned that the police will use the effectiveness of these “closed villages” as reference data, and if social stability improves, then the scheme may be implemented on a city-wide scale.

At 9:30 yesterday morning, this reporter arrived at Laosanyu Village, located in the town of Xihongmen in Beijing’s Daxing District. The village population is seriously imbalanced: it claims more than 600 residents, but its floating population now numbers more than 6,000 people. The village put up a border wall with thirteen outlets, and a black iron gate was installed across each one. On the gates is written “Gate opens at 6 am and is locked at 11pm.”

A guard standing by the gate said that after 11 pm, twelve of the iron gates are sealed shut, leaving the main gate to the town as the only possible point of entry or exit. “If the villagers come return home late, they have to show their passes and we’ll let residents through,” the guard said.

Zuo Baoshuan, deputy director of the Daxing PSB, said that in nearly one hundred village throughout the district, locals are outnumbered by outside migrants. The rate of crimes and break-ins at houses rented by the floating population is more than 80%. “After the first sixteen villages are closed off, the rest of the villages will adopt this sealed-off style of management by the end of June,” Zuo said.