Tom Phillips - Hundreds take part in rare protest in Beijing over migrant crackdown
Hundreds of protesters
have taken to the streets of the Chinese capital to pillory Beijing’s
crackdown on migrant communities with chants of “violent evictions
violate human rights”. Demonstrators gathered
on the streets of Feijia village, about 12 miles northeast of Tiananmen Square,
on Sunday for the small but rare rally condemning the eviction and demolition
campaign.
Activists say
thousands of migrant workers have been forced from their homes in Beijing’s
rundown periphery since late November when authorities intensified efforts to
drive “low-end”
migrant workers out of the city in the wake of a deadly tenement
fire. Sunday’s protest was
not reported in China’s Communist party controlled press but videos and
photographs of the event spread online, with human rights campaigners cheering
the scenes.
“The ‘low population’
is hitting back,” tweeted Yaxue
Cao, the editor of ChinaChange.org,
an English-language human rights website. Footage showed crowds
processing through the community, which is just north of the motorway leading
to Beijing’s international airport and close to the 798 art district, itself
the target of violent demolitions in the past. One group carried a
white banner emblazoned with the phrase: “Baoli qugan qinfan renquan” - forced
evictions violate human rights.
Eli Friedman, a
Cornell University academic who studies China’s labour movement, said the
protest – which coincided with the international human rights day – appeared to
be the first since Beijing’s recent crackdown began.
The demonstration
suggested Beijing may have miscalculated how much outrage would be caused by
the “ferocity” of its campaign, which has seen once vibrant migrant communities
reduced to rubble.
Friedman, the author
of a recent article about the evictions called Evicting
the Underclass, predicted authorities would now move swiftly to ensure that
the protest was nipped in the bud.
“They have a very
well-developed apparatus for responding [to this kind of protest] ... They do
some divide and conquer [among protest leaders], they make some compromises,
they pay a few people off … they might arrest a few people or sometimes even
beat a few people up… But usually their repression is pretty targeted - they
don’t do mass arrests in most cases - and they make the problem go away.”.. read more:
