After two years of toil on an Olympics-linked electrical project, 50-year-old Dai Yi has been packed off to his country home, unable to witness first-hand the fruits of his work at the Beijing Games.
Dai is one of many laborers and others lacking Beijing residence papers who say they have been ordered out as the city’s pre-Games clean-up turns toward its millions of ragtag migrants.
“The authorities will not let us stay. It’s because of the Olympics,” said the diminutive laborer, his work-roughened hands dragging two beat-up suitcases through a crowd at Beijing’s main train station.
Headed home to poverty-stricken Anhui Province, Dai has lost the roughly 1,000 yuan (about US$145) in monthly earnings that was an important lifeline to his extended family of eight back home.
“I don’t have a job now so I won’t be able to make any money until I figure out what to do,” he said.
Dai and other migrants said they were instructed by authorities to leave Beijing this week as the city enters the homestretch for the Beijing Olympics, which begin on Aug. 8.
The last-minute makeover for the city of 17 million people has included a crackdown on its huge vice industry, a shutdown of work at construction sites, and measures to curb Beijing’s notoriously foul air.
The clean-up now also includes the rough-hewn migrants from China’s vast countryside whose hard work in often dangerous conditions and for low pay has helped fuel Beijing’s growth and build Olympic venues.
The number of migrants in the city topped 5 million at the end of last year, or nearly one in three people in the capital, the city government said at the time.
It was not clear how many such people would leave. An official with the Beijing government’s press office denied migrants were ordered out.
But several migrants said an exodus was under way.
“My feeling is that it is not fair,” Yuan Daxin said, 36, who was also at the train station on his way home.
Yuan, from the northwestern province of Gansu, labored at an office tower construction site until Sunday, when such work across the city was halted.
His employer told workers they were getting an “Olympic holiday.”
However, Yuan noted cheerily that his Beijing work helped his family back home buy its first television, which they will use to watch the Games.
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
SEEKING ORDER: Rodrigo Paz said that ‘anyone who wants to destroy the nation will have to deal with this president and the full force of the constitution’ Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on Wednesday said that the nation was at a “breaking point” after nearly a month of protests that have caused shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Paz, who took office six months ago amid the worst economic crisis there in four decades, is battling a groundswell of fury over his policies. The political capital, La Paz, has been besieged by low-income workers and members of the indigenous majority calling for his resignation. “The country needs order and is reaching breaking point,” the 58-year-old said at a public event in La Paz, renewing his appeal for dialogue. On Tuesday, the Bolivian
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS