The banner reads: “It is everyone's responsibility to clear out the low-end population. People like tiding up the environment.” Viral photo on social media.
A week after the deadly fire that killed 19 broke out in Daxing district, on the southern outskirts of Beijing, the city government launched a campaign against illicit buildings and cleared out thousands of migrant workers: the so-called “low-end population.”
The forced eviction of these people started a few years back. In 2014 in central Beijing, the Haidian district government shut down seven grassroots markets, forcing migrants to leave so that authorities could appropriate the space for “upper-end” commercial purposes.
Rural migrants who had been laboring in small workshops inside the city were forced to settle around the outskirts of the capital. Then came the fire.
And in recent days, just as these rural migrant workers were forced out of their dwellings into the streets, Beijing’s temperature fell to below 0 degrees Celsius at night.
Chinese netizens could not repress their anger and slammed the government on social media.
Ding Shenning, a high-profile personality on social media platform Weibo, criticized:
In response to widespread criticism, the Beijing Chinese Communist Party committee stressed that local government does not have a policy of evicting the “low-end population,” calling it a rumor and emphasizing that the action was taken to prevent fires.
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