Beijing to clear 'uncivilised' elements from subway stations

BEIJING, July 6, 2007 (AFP) - Beijing plans to start clearing beggars and other "uncivilised" elements from major city subway stations next week as it continues sprucing up for next year's Olympics, state media reported on Friday.

Enforcement teams will begin patrolling four key lines on Monday to chase out the beggars, peddlers and performers who flock to subway stations during the summer to escape the city heat, the Beijing News said.

"This behaviour is disturbing normal order and impacting the passenger situation and subway environment," the paper quoted an unnammed official with the Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corporation as saying.

Any found to have broken any laws or regulations will be turned over to authorities, it said.

Virtually unknown in China 20 years ago, beggars, the homeless, street musicians and peddlers hawking everything from maps to fake dvds are becoming much more common across the capital.

The phenomenon is partly due to the the economic reforms that have created a huge wealth gap and a loosening of social controls that have allowed an influx of migrants from rural areas.

The beggars, hawkers and the homeless often take to protected areas such as subway stations during Beijing's cold winters and humid summers.

Beijing will host the Olympics next year in August, one of the hottest month of the year.

Other press reports said in March that Beijing planned to round up undesirables and ship them out of the city as part of Olympic clean-up efforts.

It would expand holding centres for beggars, hawkers, operators of illegal taxis and other lawless elements, who would then be shipped back to their home provinces, in an operation set to begin sometime this year, the reports said.

Do they think people are stupid? Everyone knows China has a dubious human rights record, shipping homeless people away (who surprisingly enough exist in most cities!) isn't going to make a bit of a difference. And street musicians give subway stations a much better atmosphere if you ask me.

Plenty of other cities in the West have done similar things prior to major international events. Didn't the Americans do that for Atlanta?

I don't know, you tell me.

Do they think people are stupid? Everyone knows China has a dubious human rights record, shipping homeless people away (who surprisingly enough exist in most cities!) isn't going to make a bit of a difference. And street musicians give subway stations a much better atmosphere if you ask me.

Wow, now that has become a human right issue just because it happens in China. :ohno:

I don't know, you tell me.

Follow the news. It's good for you.

Homeless Games
28 March 2001

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The treatment of homeless people during the Olympics has brought controversy to the games in Atlanta and Sydney, but police and Olympic organizers in Salt Lake City say they plan no widespread roundup of the indigent during the 2002 Winter Games.

"Do we have any special plan to move anybody? No," said Scott Folsom, assistant Salt Lake City police chief and Olympic coordinator for the department.

When the question of dealing with homeless people has come up at Olympic planning sessions, the answer has been: "Maintain the status quo," Folsom said.

But Linda Hilton, a community activist, is concerned that the status quo might land a lot of the homeless in jail.

"Let me just say this. They say it's the status quo, yet they say they're not going to be rounding people up," Hilton said.

On the streets of Salt Lake City today, the status quo for a homeless person often involves citations for minor infractions, illegal camping, loitering, littering and the like, Hilton said. She is chairwoman of the Humanitarian Services Committee, a group that works with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee on issues affecting the needy during the games.

Folsom points out that being homeless is not illegal in the city.

"Vagrancy is not against the law. Homeless people will be arrested only if they commit something that is a crime," Folsom said, citing aggressive panhandling and theft as examples.

Petty charges can mount up for a person living on the streets, and without the cash to pay the fines, courts will often issue a warrant for the person's arrest, Hilton said.

Hilton says she will ask police to declare a temporary moratorium on serving these warrants during the games, in order to avoid a scene like the one during the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

There, about 10,000 homeless men were arrested in the year leading up to the games, according to Anita Beatty, executive director of the Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless. Lawsuits followed.

"I'm not saying that we're going to be Atlanta, but we just look at what's happened everywhere along," Hilton said.

At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, organizers drafted a plan designed to improve the way homeless people are treated during the games.

Sydney officials said people would not be harassed or relocated unless there was a security threat or a disturbance, but others acknowledged that compliance with the plan was difficult to monitor.

Homelessness is a bigger issue in Sydney, where social service workers estimate that 15,000 people stay in the shelters of New South Wales, and about 1,500 people each night sleep on Sydney's streets.

One estimate puts the Salt Lake City homeless population at 3,000, Hilton said.

Hilton thinks the city's homeless shelters do a pretty good job with the resources they have, but shelters are usually full. Under normal circumstances, overflow from the shelters often will be accommodated at inexpensive hotels, she said. But during the Olympics, these rooms likely will be full.

^^ there are people who just try to twist everything and somehow turn it into something it's not. Bush is the master of it :)

People often twist and bend news to suit their own agendas....

Do they think people are stupid? Everyone knows China has a dubious human rights record, shipping homeless people away (who surprisingly enough exist in most cities!) isn't going to make a bit of a difference. And street musicians give subway stations a much better atmosphere if you ask me.

What does moving homeless away have anything to do with China's human rights records? Homeless ruins the city's image moving them because of a huge event is nothing wrong.

You're missing the point entirely. What i'm saying is that by getting rid of homeless people isn't going to make foreigners think China is some wonderful prosperous communist country because there are no beggars. A bit like the rumours of North Korea only using their modern subway cars when tourists visit the country, or the fools who tried to convince people in the sixties that commie blocks were a way to create a new sense of community. I hate all this olympics showcasing bollox where countries try and pretend that their city is better than it really is.

And let's not forget the ridiculous patronising attitude they seem to have, the authorities seem to talk about homeless people as if they were poultry for christ sakes.

Happens all the time in California. My friends from Irvine say they always hear of homeless shipped out to Los Angeles.

You're missing the point entirely. What i'm saying is that by getting rid of homeless people isn't going to make foreigners think China is some wonderful prosperous communist country because there are no beggars. A bit like the rumours of North Korea only using their modern subway cars when tourists visit the country, or the fools who tried to convince people in the sixties that commie blocks were a way to create a new sense of community. I hate all this olympics showcasing bollox where countries try and pretend that their city is better than it really is.

And let's not forget the ridiculous patronising attitude they seem to have, the authorities seem to talk about homeless people as if they were poultry for christ sakes.
It is not necessarily an image issue that you claim is the point of this exercise. There may be more practical reasons why this is happening, namely the crowds that are expected to flood the subway lines during the Games. Hawkers and beggars pose a safety risk especially when Beijing will be flooded with tourists. The article mentioned :

"This behaviour is disturbing normal order and impacting the passenger situation and subway environment," the paper quoted an unnammed official with the Beijing Mass Transit Railway Operation Corporation as saying.

Many of these beggars are low-skilled peasants who migrated from the countryside into the city. Jobless and penniless, they stay on the streets. In the long-run, they're better off going home than to make the cities worse off. Since they're not willing to go home on their own will, what other way is there to do but to round them up?

Nothing wrong with this. They clog up the overcrowed underground system.
People should not be using this story just to rag on china. Homless people are problem all over the world. In a denese city like Beijing people want to get on with the business of running the city and sadly like most if not all places in world the homeless rate at the bottom.