52 The EconomistNovember 16th 2019
1E
very evening around nine o’clock,
dozens of homeless people start to
trickle into Sanlian Taofen, a 24-hour
bookshop in Beijing. Early arrivals jostle
for one of the comfy chairs. Latecomers
have to sleep on the cold floor. Guan Zhong,
a homeless man from the eastern province
of Shandong, calls the shop his “Wednes-
day home”. On other days the unemployed
42-year-old sleeps on benches in round-
the-clock cafes. Mr Guan says he frequently
changes venues to avoid “abusing the gen-
erosity” of managers. The bookshop is his
favourite, not least because it is warm and
quiet at night. “Burger King outlets are theworst—they expel people like me,” he says.
Thirty years ago homeless people were a
rare sight in China’s cities. Strict controls
on internal migration made it difficult for
rural residents to move to urban areas.
Most city-dwellers lived in housing sup-
plied by the government, for which they
paid peppercorn rents. Since then much
has changed. Migration controls haveeased. Most urban housing has been priva-
tised. Villages have been flattened to make
way for growing cities. Street-sleepers are
still less visible than they are in the centres
of some rich-world cities. But they are far
more common than before.
Most of the homeless arrived from the
countryside, as did Mr Guan. In the cities
they cannot access local welfare, including
social housing. That is because of the hu-
kou, or household-registration, system.
This usually allows people to receive such
benefits only in their place of birth. So if
they cannot afford to rent a home, they of-
ten have little choice but to sleep rough.
That is a problem for officials, who of-
ten regard visible homelessness as an eye-
sore that reflects badly on their cities. Only
a few years ago, street-sleepers and beggars
were routinely rounded up, detained and
forcibly sent back to their home towns in
the name of maintaining “social order and
stability”. But the law allowing this was
abolished in 2003 after a public outcry over
the death of a migrant who was being de-
tained in the southern city of Guangzhou
for lacking the documents that were then
required to live legally in an urban area.
Since then officials have become less
heavy-handed. They appear to accept that
urbanisation will cause some homeless-
ness, and that this will not threaten stabil-
ity as much as they once feared.
The 800-odd “custody and repatriation”
centres, where homeless people were once
detained, have been turned into “relief sta-
tions”. The police are no longer involved in
managing them. That work is now entirely
undertaken by the Ministry of Civil Affairs,
which is responsible for aid and charitable
work. The stations—now numbering about
1,500—offer food, clothing and temporary
accommodation, without charge. They are
prohibited from doing anything to street-
sleepers against their will. Admission is
supposed to be voluntary.
As Mr Guan’s sleeping habits suggest,
however, homeless people often stay clear
of the government’s shelters. Last year the
relief stations received 1.6m visitors, about
the same number as a decade ago. But Yu
Yanping of Wuhan University of Technol-
ogy estimates that only 30-40% of home-
less people use them.
Some street-sleepers fear that, if they
were to use such shelters, officials might
coerce them into returning to their home
towns. Relief stations are required by law
to “persuade” those they assist to go back.
They often do this by offering a free train or
bus ticket, and asking relatives to take
them in. Some people, like Mr Guan, do not
want relatives to know their whereabouts.
Mr Guan owes his extended family in Shan-
dong 20,000 yuan ($2,850). He worries
what would happen should a relief station
contact them. A Chinese academic saysStreet-sleepersNo shelter for some
BEIJING AND NANJING
For city officials, homelessness has become an embarrassing problemChina
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