PrintA deserted room that used to be for lease.
( Hue Huang / )
Thousands of college grads living in $50-a-month hovels are losing their homes.
A deserted room that used to be for lease.
( Hue Huang / )BEIJING, China — Tangjialing looks a bit more deserted than usual on a cloudless morning. Homeless dogs idly stroll amid the dust raised by a passing bus. A shirtless butcher is squatting at his store front, washing the chicken blood off his cutting board. Street vendors are dozing under their umbrellas while restaurant waitresses are leaning on the glass front door quietly observing the few pedestrians.
In addition to the empty buildings and deserted streets, the big “Demolish” signs on the brick walls reveal the fate of this village. Tangjialing, like five other villages in Beijing’s Haidian district, will be torn down for having “unauthorized construction.”
Tangjialing was a little known village of 3,000 residents in the northwest outskirts of Beijing, which in recent years has become home to more than 50,000 young workers and fresh college graduates. It has achieved notoriety as home to the “ant tribes” — a popular sociological term to describe the thousands of low-income young professionals who crowd China’s urban slums.
Their rooms might be small, but their dreams are big. “Ants” are attracted by the village’s low cost of living. They pay 350 to 700 kuai (about $50-$100) per month for a room no larger than 215 square feet plus a bathroom and a kitchen. Many share a single, poorly constructed room with roommates for an even lower rent. Every day, they rush into the city by bus early in the morning to work in Shangdi and Zhongguancun, Beijing’s IT hub.
However, those “ants” are now being forced out of their homes, as the city’s Commission of Urban Planning has announced plans to demolish and rebuild the village. Most commercial buildings have already been torn down, and some scrap collectors are scrounging among the ruins for anything of value left behind.
Renovation plans and compensation policies are posted everywhere in the village, but they are rendered nearly invisible by advertisements and written phone numbers of moving companies plastered over them. Although the government has not announced a firm date for the villagers to move out, some residents have already left for good.
“The eight college students who rented my place all moved out,” said a male landlord who requested anonymity out of fear of government reprisal. “I didn’t dare to ask where they went, but cheap housing isn’t easy to find nowadays.”
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/100808/china-economy-students-beijing-development-housing
