Beijing starts gating, locking migrant villages

[GoFlyKiteNow]

Published: Thursday July 15, 2010 MYT 6:41:00 AM

Beijing starts gating, locking migrant villages

BEIJING (AP): 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 China's migrant workers, who already face limited access to schooling and government services and are routinely blamed by city folk for rising crime. Used to the hardship of the farm and the lack of privilege, migrants seem to be taking the new controls in their stride.

Jia Yangui said he accepts the new system as a trade-off for escaping farm work in the northern province of Shanxi. He arrived in Beijing less than two months ago and lives with a relative in one of the gated villages, Dashengzhuang. He sells oily pancakes just inside one of the gates.

"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 middle-aged woman who gave her family name as Zheng.

"Sealed management" looks like this: Gates are placed at the street and alley entrances to the villages, which are collections of walled compounds sprinkled with shops and outdoor vendors. The gates are locked between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., except for one main entrance manned by security guards or police, there to check identification papers. Security guards roam the villages by day.

"Closing up the village benefits everyone," read one banner which was put up when the first, permanent gated village was introduced in April.

 

[yuelao]

Even cities look after their own first. Sinkies are pathetic.

 

[longbow]

I see nothing wrong with this. You have a huge teeming city with easy access to anyone, large migrant pop looking for better life in the city - so this is a security measure.

 

[longbow]

Over in India they have the VIP and the VVIP. Heard that Hindu temples DO NOT ALLOW the dalits to come in to worship. Bear in mind that dalits are about 20% of population. So that is also a form of segregation. I think that locking migrant workers to maintain security is small potatoes when compared to widespread discrimination in India. Here read this:


Letter from Johannesburg: Apartheid continues in India
Rajesh Kalra, 10 July 2010, 05:20 PM IST

In the dismantling of apartheid, South Africa has experienced perhaps the most momentous event the world has witnessed in our lifetime. Before someone jumps up and says that event should be India's independence, I repeat, 'in our lifetime'. A lot of us were not born when we achieved independence (of course, whether we really did achieve independence or not is something I will tackle some other time).

A visit to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg should be a must on the itinerary of anyone visiting South Africa. If nothing else, to at least know about the birth of a system that segregated humans on the basis of colour, the miseries inflicted upon the hapless coloureds and blacks by the perpetrators of apartheid, the admirable and amazing struggle to dismantle the system, Nelson Mandela, and ultimately the success.

The entrance to the museum itself is handled in a unique manner. Tickets are given out randomly and are marked whites and non-whites. As you approach the gates, you are segregated through two different entrances. It takes a moment for you to understand what is going on. This is the museum's way of giving you a bit of a real feel of apartheid.

The initial reaction is to resist, for it divides the group randomly. You heave a sigh of relief when after the barely two-minute separation, the two streams merge. I could not help wondering if this short, controlled, almost simulated, experience could evoke such reactions, what it would have been in real life.

And one does not need to wait very long. As you walk through the well-laid out exhibits, you realise how repressive the regime was and how ruthlessly apartheid was implemented. Different entrances for entering a premise, different loos, segregated seats in buses, menial jobs for non-whites with lower wages, horrible living conditions, and so on. Of course, all this is well-documented even otherwise and no need to spend too much time on it.

Two things in particular did catch my attention, though. The regime was so maniacally focused on implementing apartheid that there were signboards all over about who, what, when, where. In fact there were so many that South Africa once looked like a country of signboards. The other was a picture of an officer peering through a window to ensure that the husband and wife in a room inside were not indulging in sex. Why? Because one was black and the other white and law prohibited them to have sex, for it would make the white blood impure. Those caught violating laws were punished severely. The thoughts of khaps and caste and 'honour killings' raced through my mind.

I also couldn't help draw a comparison with the concentration camps run by the Nazis. I was reminded of Mauthausen, a camp near Linz in Austria, which we visited a few years ago. I still remember, the exhibits were so stark that my wife and I took turns to go in so that one of us could stay out with our young son and keep him away from what was on view inside. That was Nazis' way of persecuting the Jews, and here was the white man's way of persecuting non-whites. There was little difference, really.

Back to this museum, even as we looked around and read references to Gandhi and how he helped the South African struggle, I wondered why he failed in his own country, and I am not referring to his non-violent struggle for independence. Instead, I am referring to the fact that despite making all the noises about equality, democracy, and all that is politically correct, we continue to follow practices that are as bad as, if not worse than, apartheid. If anything, we may actually be getting worse.

At least in South Africa it was followed by the state, officially, and one knew what to expect. Ours, in contrast, is a nation of lies. We pretend to be something we are not. We follow apartheid in our own way. In our country, the whites have been replaced with the rich, the powerful, the politicians and the VIPs. No wonder, in most offices and other places, you even have toilets marked -- Ladies, Gentlemen and VIPs or Officers.

And we are not even apologetic about it. Even in the nation's capital, New Delhi, which perhaps is the patron saint of the Indian apartheid system, as one approaches the international airport, there is a huge board that says "VIP access". A sensitive regime could have easily said "restricted access'" or something to that effect. But when the decision makers and policy makers have apartheid so deeply ingrained in them, they couldn't be bothered.

South Africans waged a unique, outstanding struggle to end apartheid. India too needs its own new struggle to rid the nation of the sort of apartheid it practices. The result has to be a system that stops lying to its people all the time about its greatness. How we discovered ZERO and this and that. If truth be told, in terms of dignity of humans (read non-VIPs), we remain what we discovered, a big zero.