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‘Rat tribe’ flees high costs and dwells underground
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Making it in the big city is hard for anyone without means, whether migrant workers or college grads. Around China many are forced to find cheap shelter in basements and air raid shelters, as well as tiny rooms. They are known as rats and ants, according to Neil Connor and Wing Tan.
Near Beijing’s US$600 million Olympic stadium, migrant worker Ye Yiwen, her husband and two children cram into a tiny underground room, sheltering from the Chinese capital’s biting winter and soaring property prices.
Ye’s family left behind a 200-square-meter house in a rural outpost 1,000 kilometers away to live in the dimly lit basement, which — at 10 square meters — has just enough space for two beds and one table.
“Of course the house in our village is more comfortable, but this is where the work is,” says Ye, who declines to give her real name.
“And I do miss my flowers,” she adds with resignation.
The decades-long movement of hundreds of millions of people from China’s countryside to its cities is the greatest human migration in history, but those who make the journey do not necessarily find prosperity at their destinations.
About 281,000 people live underground in Beijing, according to city authorities, although reports say closer to one million inhabit the capital’s basements, former air raid shelters and other subterranean dwellings.
The “rat tribe,” as they are dubbed locally, are mainly poor migrant workers seeking new opportunities in booming cities.
Ye left her village of a few hundred people in the eastern province of Anhui 15 years ago to live in the bustling capital.
A domestic helper or ayi who works for a family in the Guanjuncheng or City of Champions compound meters from the Olympic village, she brought her sons, now 20 and 21, to Beijing not long after they finished school.
“We don’t get in each other’s way in our room, although we know it is not ideal,” she says.
Migrants such as Ye face formidable barriers in settling in China’s big cities under the country’s strict household registration system, known as the hukou.
In November, the central government announced plans to let more farmers become urban residents in some medium and smaller cities, but the soaring cost of property means Ye’s family, who earn a combined 9,000 yuan (US$1,500) a month, will find it impossible to buy.
Prices averaged 31,465 yuan per square meter in December in Beijing, one of the country’s most expensive cities, a 28.3 percent leap year on year, according to a survey by the independent China Index Academy.
Across 100 major cities, new home prices rose 11.51 percent year on year to 10,833 yuan per square meter, the figures showed.
Beijing’s average home price is 13.3 times the average monthly income, state media said. The World Bank considers a five-to-one ratio the limit of affordability, while the United Nations sets it at three-to-one.
‘Saving money my big concern’
The soaring prices — a symptom of the widening gap between rich and poor — are a source of discontent, and not only from migrants.
Guan Sheng, 25, who grew up in Beijing, sits on his bed in his four-square-meter underground room, searching for jobs on his laptop as the fetid odor from a communal toilet wafts through the door.
Above him, drying clothes on a steel pipe covered in rust and peeling paint carry hot water to those living on higher floors — the pipes are his only source of heat.
Guan, who declines to give his real name, pays 600 yuan a month for the basement dwelling.
“Saving money is my big concern as far as housing is concerned,” he says, walking up a gloomy corridor.
“I typically pay 30 yuan a month for electricity, and there is a set 15-yuan water charge,” he says, proud of such bargain accommodation but his tone turns to dejection as he adds: “I really can’t ever see me owning my own property.”
Others in the capital live deeper underground, and in more squalid conditions.
Local media recently reported a group of people living in a sewer. Migrants living there were sent home and the manholes quickly sealed as officials sought to prevent damage to the city image.
Thousands of air raid shelters were built across the capital after the New China was founded in 1949. Their use as accommodation was banned by the government in 2010, but many of the city’s poorer residents still make them their homes.
Underneath a building near Guan’s lodgings, an elderly woman emerges from a four-square-meter air raid shelter room, taking dirty clothes to a grimy washroom with a long trough urinal, its condition reminiscent of that in a decades-old stadium after a packed sports event.
“There are rooms available,” she says, rubbing the soaked fabric of a pair of boxer shorts in a plastic basin.
Another voice echoes in the dark: “Why would someone be looking for a room here?”
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