【10.07.15 印度时报】Beijing starts locking up migrant villagers

青蛙小王子

BEIJING: The government calls it "sealed management".' China's capital has started gating and locking some of its lower-income neighborhoods overnight, with police or security checking identification papers around the clock, in a throwback to an older style of control.

It's Beijing's latest effort to reduce rising crime often blamed on the millions of rural Chinese migrating to cities for work. The capital's Communist Party secretary wants the approach promoted citywide. But some state media and experts say the move not only looks bad but imposes another layer of control on the already stigmatized, vulnerable migrants.

So far, gates have sealed off 16 villages in the sprawling southern suburbs, where migrants are attracted to cheaper rents and in some villages outnumber permanent residents 10 to one.

The gated villages are the latest indignity for migrant workers, who already face limited access to schooling and government services and are routinely blamed by city folk for rising crime. Jia Yangui said he accepts the new system as a trade-off for escaping farm work in the northern province of Shanxi. "Anyway, it's not as strict as before, when we migrants would be detained on the way to the toilet," said Jia's relative, a woman named Zheng. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/China/Beijing-starts-locking-up-migrant-villagers/articleshow/6169273.cms