Beijing starts gating, locking migrant villages - Yahoo News

Gang Xia Village, Shenzhen

AP reports about villages of migrant workers in Beijing being closed off during nighttime. The reason for this radical move? Crime:

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.

Urban villages are rural communities, incorporated by cities. You can find them all over China: former farmers reacted pragmatic to the expanding city by constructing cheap housing for migrants. The Chinese government is not very fond of the villages, and wants to break them down - because they don’t fit in the image of a modern city.

Closing them off is a reflex with a historic meaning:

Gating has been an easy and effective way to control population throughout Chinese history, said Huang, the geography professor. In past centuries, some walled cities would impose curfews and close their gates overnight. In the first decades of communist rule, the desire for top-down organization and control showed in work-unit compounds, usually guarded and enclosed.

However, there is a difference:

“To put it crudely, gated communities in the city are a way for the upper middle-class and urban rich to keep out trespassers, whereas gated villages represent a way for the state to ‘keep in’ or contain the problem of ‘migrant workers’ who live in these villages,” Pow Choon-Pieu, an assistant professor of geography at the National University of Singapore who has studied the issue, said in an e-mail.

Read the whole story here: Beijing starts gating, locking migrant villages - Yahoo News.