The EconomistNovember 16th 2019 China 532 homeless people who are “professional
beggars” see a day spent at a shelter as a day
of lost earnings.
Those who are wary of the shelters can
find little help from ngos. That is because
the government still regards homelessness
as sensitive and is reluctant to let ngos get
involved. In 2017 the government of Beijing
evicted many migrants from poor-quality
housing and ordered volunteers who tried
to shelter the newly homeless from freez-
ing temperatures to stop doing so. During
politically important events, street-sleep-
ers are often corralled inside government
shelters to keep them from tarnishing the
Communist Party’s image. “Vagrants and
beggars are not allowed to appear on the
streets,” said a directive issued in Septem-
ber by one district of Beijing. It told offi-
cials to “collect” such people for the sake of
“stability” during the lead-up to festivities
marking the 70th anniversary of Commu-
nist rule on October 1st.
In the eastern city of Nanjing the man-
ager of a government relief station offers
your correspondent a rare glimpse inside,
on condition she and the facility not be
named. It looks like a medium-priced ho-
tel. Its spacious rooms have flat-screen
televisions and en-suite bathrooms. Its
yard is lined with exercise equipment.
“Some people abuse our hospitality,” the
manager says. Every year before the lunar
new-year festival, “people come to us pre-
tending to be homeless just so they can
spend a night here and get a free train ticket
home.” She is getting better at checking.
Any one with a pricey phone is probably a
fraud, she says. Those admitted who want
to return to the streets are “free to do so”.
The government allows a few ngos to
provide limited aid. One is He Feng, a chari-
ty in Beijing that receives funding from the
Ministry of Civil Affairs. Zhang Xiao, its
founder, leads a team of eight people who
criss-cross Beijing every day, offering food
and other necessities to the homeless. He
Feng sends regular reports to the ministry.
These include the charity’s estimates of the
total number of long-term homeless peo-
ple in central Beijing (several hundred, by
its last count) and the main reasons people
give for sleeping rough. The ngo does not
tell the ministry the names of the homeless
or their precise locations, Mr Zhang says.
A few of the street-sleepers are petition-
ers who have travelled to the capital to seek
redress for local injustices. The authorities
are especially nervous of such people, fear-
ing they might stage protests. Govern-
ment-run shelters are not for them. Those
caught (their sheaves of papers, including
court documents and letters of complaint,
give them away) are often whisked to
“black jails” where they are held until offi-
cials arrange to have them escorted back to
their home towns. Vagrants are tolerated,
but not the wrong sort. 7
“S
ociety hasbeen pushed to the brink
of a total breakdown.” So warned a se-
nior policeman on November 12th, after a
23rd successive weekend of unrest on
Hong Kong’s streets, with no sign of the
usual weekday lull. A day later the central
government also put it starkly. Hong Kong,
it said, was “sliding into the abyss of terro-
rism”. The past few days had been grim in-
deed—a protester dying of an injury appar-
ently suffered while running away from
police, a man being shot at close range by
an officer and someone being doused by
protesters in flammable liquid and set on
fire. This week police for the first time bat-
tled with students on campus.
Some observers had thought the protest
movement might begin to fizzle out amid
widespread anxiety about its impact on the
economy and in the absence of any sign
that it might achieve the goal of full-
fledged democracy. But the death on No-
vember 8th of the fleeing student, Alex
Chow, fanned the flames. On the following
day, a Saturday, tens of thousands of prot-
esters gathered across the city to mourn.
On Monday protesters tried to enforce a
“general strike” in response to Mr Chow’s
death by blocking streets and railway lines
and throwing petrol-bombs at trains. The
shooting that day of an unarmed protester
who, police say, was trying to grab an offi-cer’s gun increased the tension.
Both sides deny their own excesses.
Many protesters initially dismissed the
case of the man who was set on fire after re-
monstrating with demonstrators as the
work of a stuntman. At a press conference
following Monday’s mayhem, Carrie Lam,
the city’s leader, responded to allegations
of widespread police brutality by accusing
the press of distorting “isolated incidents”.
Mrs Lam, who during the summer ex-
pressed eagerness for dialogue with her
critics, now dismisses protesters as “ene-
mies of the people”. The police label those
who refuse to denounce the protesters as
accomplices. But moderate politicians who
eschew violence still mainly blame the au-
thorities for the recent escalation.
Mrs Lam’s foes are everywhere. Every
day this week bankers and professionals
have taken to the streets during lunch-
breaks, blocking traffic as masked protes-
ters nearby smash traffic lights and set fire
to bins. Even pro-establishment legislators
have criticised her lack of ideas. Some
would like her to be even tougher with the
protesters (on November 9th a Chinese of-
ficial said Hong Kong urgently needed
tougher security legislation). But John
Tsang, a former finance secretary who
competed with Mrs Lam in 2017 for the post
of chief executive—and might have won, if
the public rather than a committee stacked
with Communist Party sympathisers had
been asked to vote on the matter—told lo-
cal radio that it was up to the government
to “start to de-escalate”.
To many, the police have become the
real enemy. On November 12th riot officers
tried to enter the rural campus of the Chi-
nese University of Hong Kong (one of their
volleys of tear-gas is pictured), but were re-
pelled by students who threw petrol bombs
and fired arrows. Staff who tried to mediate
were tear-gassed. There were tense stand-
offs at other universities, too.
Many speculate that the government
will use the violence to justify imposing a
curfew or cancelling district elections set
for November 24th, even though Mrs Lam
still says she wants the polls to go ahead.
Pro-establishment candidates normally
perform well at the district level, but this
time pro-democracy politicians are expect-
ed to make considerable gains. That could
unnerve Mrs Lam and the leadership in
Beijing, since control of the 18 district
councils could give the pro-democracy
camp a bigger voice in Hong Kong’s legisla-
ture (six out of its 70 seats are reserved for
councillors) and in the committee that
chooses the chief executive (councillors
make up nearly one-tenth of its 1,200 mem-
bers). On November 12th the People’s Daily,
the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece,
said that holding “fair elections” would re-
quire “decisively” ending the riots. That
seems a distant goal. 7HONG KONG
Confrontation between protesters and
police is turning ever uglierUnrest in Hong KongTowards the brink
Tranquil no more