48 Hours: The Last Two Days Before the 25th

At the village's south and west entrances stood ceremonial archways. The side facing out bore the village name, "Xinjian Village." The side facing in was carved with four characters: "Safe Passage In and Out."

"We're Leaving Any Minute"

The old woman was inside her home, leaning out over the second-floor window that faced the alley, calling down to the people below.

Whenever someone passed, she asked: "What's going on?" Then: "Where are you moving to?"

She asked everyone — strangers and neighbors alike.

She was 80, a native Beijinger, living here with her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter.

They were moving to Huangcun — "about 15 li from here." Asked when they were leaving, she said: "Any minute now."

Across the alley, a garment subcontractor had rented the building. Scraps of fabric covered the floor — mostly clothing material, some of it wool and cashmere. There were two sewing machines, a wooden table, and two pieces of specialized garment equipment. The owner wanted none of it. Too expensive to move.

Diagonally across from the garment company lived a local villager. The tenants had all been cleared out, but the landlords didn't have to leave. The old woman and her family were moving because the building wasn't allowed to burn coal for heat — they could only use electric heaters, and the elderly couldn't take the cold.

A bathhouse being demolished inside Xinjian Village on the afternoon of November 25

The old woman who said "we're leaving any minute" lived in Xinjian Second Village, Xihongmen Township, Daxing District, Beijing. Xinjian Village was made up of four villages, which residents still called the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Brigades — a holdover from the "production brigade" terminology of the People's Commune era. In 1955, several villages from what was then Changping County were relocated here en masse; the name "Xinjian" (New Settlement) comes from that. The old woman was among the earliest residents.

Against her 62 years in Xinjian Second Village, the urgency of this move could be measured in hours. It was the combined result of a string of policy decisions and one unforeseen event.

On November 1, 2016, Beijing — acting under the Coordinated Development Plan for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei — launched a campaign to clear out "low-end industries" as part of a broader effort to shed functions deemed unbecoming of the capital. Garment manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics — all closely tied to Xinjian Village — faced relocation, and large numbers of migrant workers living in the area faced displacement. Meanwhile, the city's mandatory coal-free transition, driven by worsening air quality, left Xinjian Village — classified as a shantytown slated for renovation — outside the reach of the "coal-to-gas" and "coal-to-electricity" conversion programs. It was a winter when burning coal was forbidden but no new heating existed.

The Xinjian Second Village office had sent the following shantytown renovation schedule to the village WeChat group: 1. September 28 – October 15, 2017: household surveys and registration; 2. October 16–31: village and township authorities to verify land-use rights, draw up compensation plans and resettlement housing designs; 3. November 1–15: pre-signing preparations, preliminary household talks; 4. November 16 – December 15: formal contract signing; 5. December 16–25: archival work by all departments; 6. December 26 – January 31: property selection and final settlement.

That was the original plan.

Then came the unforeseen event: the fire at Xinjian First Village on November 18. It disrupted the timeline — or rather, accelerated it.

The blaze killed 19 people. It directly triggered a 40-day citywide campaign of safety inspections, clean-ups, and enforcement.

There is no official figure for how many people were affected.

The 31 stories we are about to tell — some long, some brief — all turn on the date of November 25. Most have something to do with government decisions, and with their consequences.

We also noticed one detail. The office of a company called "Yixin Da Investment Management Co., Ltd." Like many such personal-loan firms, its office had a fish tank, and in it swam three koi. Like every company renting office space in Xinjian Third Village, they were forced to vacate.

On the afternoon of the 25th, the three koi were still there. Perhaps their owner would come back for them; perhaps they would simply vanish along with this ill-fated two-story color-steel office building.

"Just Go Home" — Six Garment Workers and One Boss

1. A young woman from Sichuan (name unknown), garment worker, 28

Around 1:30 a.m. on the 25th, she stood by a truck, a black leather backpack on her shoulders. The truck bed was nearly full. Her companions were still bringing out the last items from the alley beside them — stacked stools, folding tables. Several people's belongings were all jumbled together.

She worked at a garment factory with more than a dozen employees. The boss wanted to move to Hebei; she didn't want to go.

The landlord had told them everything had to be out by the 24th, but trucks couldn't get in during the day. "Tens of thousands of people moving at once — everything was jammed up."

For now, she was going to stay with a friend outside the Sixth Ring Road. The last thing loaded was a large bundle wrapped in cloth. "Put my pickle jar somewhere safe."

She had been in Beijing for ten years. In 2007, she was 18, making women's clothing. She started near Caoqiao, by the Third Ring Road, then followed the garment factories as they moved outward, ending up near the Fifth Ring Road.

Once she confirmed everything was loaded, she and three companions got ready to board. The driver, speaking with a northern accent, said he didn't normally do this kind of work — moving — but had come to help out.

They also had an electric scooter. She said: "I'm definitely riding in the truck. It's freezing."

She never answered the question of what she planned to do next. Finally she said: "Just go home. I'm done here."

A dormitory left behind too quickly to pack

2. A father and son from Jiangxi — son in his 30s, father's age unknown — odd-job workers at a garment factory in Xinjian Village

Around midnight on November 24, at the door of a small garment workshop on Guangming Street, along Xinjian Village's central line, the boss was loading his last truck of the day. He said he hadn't found a new workshop — he would just have to store the goods and equipment at a friend's place for now. No way to keep operating.

Watching the shop were a father and son surnamed Huang. The son was in his 30s and had been working in Beijing for seven or eight years; he had later brought his father to join him. He made four or five thousand yuan a month. He had two children; one of them had a kindergarten merit award still pinned to the wall. He had once worked near the South Third Ring Road in Fengtai, then moved to Xinjian Village after an earlier demolition.

When the fire broke out, he was in the shop and knew nothing about it. He only learned what had happened when the rescue began. Even the details he knew came from watching videos on his phone. Three days earlier, he had heard that November 25 was the deadline, but his son had spent two full days searching and still found nowhere to go.

Both men lived in the workshop. They had rigged up a crude kitchen by a side door. The workshop was a mess after the move, but their own corner was tidy. With the weather cold, someone had boiled water; the bowls were still clean.

After we left, they pulled the rolling shutter down from inside. Just like the shops next door, whose signs had already been torn off.

3. A garment factory manager, Niying Village, in her 40s

About seven kilometers south of Xinjian Village by road lies Niying Village. At the village entrance stands a decorative rockery, and to either side of it, a dozen or so small garment factories. Together they employed roughly five or six hundred workers, who both worked and lived inside.

According to the workers, around 2 p.m. on November 23, dozens of guards drove everyone out, then sealed the factories, ordering workers to leave that day and owners to vacate within three days. With nowhere to go, and afraid that if they left the guards would break in and steal things, some workers went to nearby guesthouses, others to friends' homes. But most found nowhere to stay and ended up standing in front of the factories all night — or pitching tents on the ground to sleep. That night, the temperature in Beijing dropped to minus four degrees Celsius.

By around 2 p.m. on the 24th, more than ten workers still had nowhere to go and stood at the entrance waiting for their boss to come pay them. Another twenty or so sat in the ground-floor meeting room of the village committee — some sleeping, some talking. But they were all very guarded and said little. The village head was nowhere to be found.

At 6 p.m., a female factory manager appeared, wearing a black down jacket, a camel-colored scarf, and a leather cross-body bag. More than ten workers crowded around her, agitated, asking where they could stay and when they would get paid. Standing by the rockery, she went from person to person trying to calm them — telling one: "Wait a moment, I'll have someone drive you to my great-uncle's place. He's in Hebei, close by." Then turning to another: "I'll pay you. There's no internet here right now — I'll find an internet café and transfer the money."

The manager declined to be interviewed. A young man who said he was her son tried to block us. "Don't ask us — we're in no mood. You can't help anyway. If you want interviews, go talk to the labor bureau people across the way." He gestured toward about a dozen guards in black standing across from the rockery.

By 6 p.m., those guards had again blocked the entrance, stopping anyone from sneaking back into the factories to sleep. Only people who claimed to be retrieving belongings were let in.

Brand hang-tags left behind in a garment factory in Xinjian Village

4. A husband and wife from Jiangxi — garment workers who had been in Beijing more than ten years — aged 34 and 30

On the 24th, they got a call from their landlord and rushed back to move out. The factory had shut down a few days earlier, and they had gone to Hebei for a trip, so they had missed the eviction notice entirely.

On the day of the fire, their boss had still been talking it over with the workers. Two days later, the factory closed too. The wife, surnamed Wu, said the boss had worked hard as well — leaving at two in the morning to find new factory space in Hebei, and somehow managing to find it.

The husband, surnamed Zhou, was born in 1983; the wife, surnamed Wu, in 1987. This year marked the tenth anniversary of their meeting — both had come to Beijing over a decade earlier, and met while working at the same factory ten years ago. Seven years ago they had a child. Their work depended entirely on each other: together they made water-washed leather jackets, taking cut fabric and completing every step themselves. There was no assembly line here.

Like the other small factories nearby, they were paid by the piece — twenty-some yuan for a thin jacket, thirty to forty for a thicker one.

They had followed Beijing's service trades steadily southward. They started at Muxiyuan (South Third Ring Road), where garment factories clustered back then; then moved to South Xiaojie, then Dahongmen, then Demaozhuang. "It's all along the BRT line — Line 1," Zhou said. They moved to Xinjian Village, on the edge of the Sixth Ring Road, about four or five years ago.

Zhou said many of the workers at the small factories here were couples who worked together. That was also why he didn't want to work the assembly line at a bigger factory. "We like being able to push hard when we feel like it, and ease off when we need a break," he said.

By "break" he only meant working a little slower. Their actual hours stayed at 8:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., with wages paid on the 30th of each month and the 1st of the next as their one day off.

They stayed in Beijing because together they could earn over a hundred thousand yuan a year, with little to spend it on: rent was 300 yuan a month, the factory provided meals, and the landlord's self-run heating cost 130 yuan a month — though in practice it was only ever on for about a month. Zhou put their monthly living costs at around 1,500 yuan. Wu thought for a moment and said that when they didn't go out, it might be only 1,000.

A few years earlier, they had spent over a hundred thousand yuan building a two-story, 200-square-meter house back home.

If they went back to Jiangxi, Zhou figured, they would earn "two or three thousand yuan less a month. We're paid by the piece — we can only work if the factory has orders." Their seven-year-old came to Beijing only over summer vacation; there was no way for him to attend primary school in the city. When he was younger, they could put him in a nursery, but with their 11 p.m. shifts, they never had time to pick him up.

Zhou chatted as he wiped down a power strip. The room had little left in it — a 1.5-meter double bed, tea, cups, dishes, clothes, bedding. And a small gas stove that, he said, had traveled with them to several places.

When the scrap collector had come by earlier, he had sold an old television for five yuan. LCD screens went for fifty yuan apiece.

In under an hour, the two of them had wrapped everything they owned in bedding and moved into the factory dormitory. The dormitory could house them for one more day; after that, they would follow the factory's equipment sixty kilometers away to Yongqing, Hebei.

5. A woman at an unnamed garment factory in Xinjian Village, in her 30s

At 8 p.m., seven or eight women were still gathered around an induction cooktop and an iron pot, eating noodles. The "factory" was no bigger than a small restaurant. This was their last meal in Beijing. "Tomorrow we'll probably go wherever the boss goes — but we still don't know where that is."

The women were all from Fuyang, Anhui — fellow townsfolk of the boss. They supplied garments to the wholesale market at Dahongmen and to some Taobao shops. They came to Beijing in 2007, starting near Dahongmen by the South Third Ring Road, then moved several times as rents rose or evictions came, reaching Xinjian Village the year before. After the fire, the village committee required everyone to move out by the 25th. The boss had settled up with the workers from out of province first but had no money left to pay the ones from his hometown, and was still looking for a new place to rent.

"We don't feel right asking the boss for money. He's worse off than we are. We work over ten hours a day and only earn about 20,000 yuan a year. He only makes about 100,000 a year himself."

"Almost Done — Just the Air Conditioner Left" — Four Small Business Owners

1. Li, restaurant owner, in his 30s; Lü, restaurant owner, 40

The Shanxi noodle and stir-fry restaurant sat in an apartment building at the outermost western edge of Xinjian Village.

At 2 a.m. on November 25, a truck was parked out front. Mr. Li and two helpers moved steadily in and out, loading it. The restaurant had been stripped down to a few odds and ends — the freezers, tables and chairs, pots and bowls, even the cutting boards were already loaded. The last items up were a small chopping block, cooking wine, and a boiler. Mr. Lü stood in the truck bed taking them. He had driven the truck in from Tianjin during the day, to collect Mr. Li and the others and take them to a restaurant he ran in a factory zone on the outskirts of Tianjin.

Both men were from Henan. They had moved to Xinjian Village three months earlier and opened the restaurant then. Business had been very good.

Mr. Li had just come from another demolition site — he had spent three years at Shibalidian, and before that was in Tianjin.

This was one of the street-facing shops: 200 square meters, with apartments on the second floor and above. Three employees normally lived upstairs. When they signed the lease, Mr. Li was told this was a legitimate apartment building with property rights. They had paid six months' rent upfront and spent over a hundred thousand yuan on renovations, and had not yet earned it back. The landlord refunded part of the rent, but only so much. "Can you get the coal back out of a furnace that's already lit? All you'd get is ash."

The shop closed on the 21st. That same day, someone tore down the illuminated sign, exposing the glaring LED tubes underneath.

Just before 3 a.m., as they got ready to drive off — the trip to Tianjin would take about three hours — a man in pajamas walked out of the apartment lobby several dozen meters away. Young Li called out from a distance: "Come do the room inspection!"

"What's there to inspect!" the man called back. He walked over to say goodbye to Li and the others. He was the one in charge of what Li called the "legitimate apartment building."

The front-desk room was still lit. Someone was normally on duty there around the clock. A notice dated November 22 was posted on the glass door, telling residents to move out within seven days, after which water and electricity would be cut. Next to it, a business card for "Brothers Moving Company" had been slipped in.

A street-facing restaurant with its sign already removed

2. Luo Hui, owner of Brothers Moving Company, 38

When Luo Hui came to Beijing from Chongqing in 1998, he was just 19. He lived in Dongba Township, Chaoyang District, in a flat of over 20 square meters, paying 500 yuan a month, working for a moving company. In that flat he built a life: in 2002 he married a Shandong woman who worked as an accountant at a private firm; in 2007 their first child was born. That same year he went out on his own and started his own moving company, "Brothers."

By 2012, rent had risen to 1,000 yuan. Luo Hui did the math: he made five or six thousand a month, his wife three or four thousand — together they could afford it. But when demolition came, they had no choice but to leave.

Between 2012 and 2017, Luo Hui — who had been moving people in Beijing for 20 years — moved his own household more than a dozen times, living in Chaoyang, Haidian, Dongcheng, and Xicheng, for as little as six months and as long as three-odd years. "I figured: if there's no demolition, I'll stay. But these past few years, there's always demolition — every single move has been because of demolition." He also worried about his children's schooling. "The older one is 10, in fourth grade, doing all right. But the younger one can't get into school anymore — schools here don't take kids from other provinces now; you need this document and that document."

After the fire at Xihongmen's Xinjian Village, Luo Hui's business picked up. He shuttled between Jiugong in Daxing, Qiaoxin, and Xibeiwang in Haidian. Normally eight hours was enough; he'd leave at nine or ten in the morning and be home by five or six. Over the past four or five days, the number of moves per day had jumped to more than a dozen.

But Luo Hui said "the price can't go up." The base fare was still 300 yuan — the same as before the fire. What changed was the top end: "there's no ceiling anymore." Long-distance runs could climb into the thousands. "These past few days, a lot of migrant workers in Beijing have been moving to Tianjin and Hebei." Short runs were all over the place — a few kilometers, or a few dozen. Many people didn't know where to go; Luo Hui would drive them around in circles, hunting for somewhere to stay.

Luo Hui himself had recently moved again — he had lost count of how many times now. He and his family of four had been living in an apartment in Xibeiwang, Haidian, 15 to 16 square meters for 2,000 yuan a month. He got notice on the 20th to clear out by the 22nd. While helping others move, he searched at the same time for a place of his own, and eventually found something comparable near the Summer Palace — also 2,000 yuan a month, 20 square meters. "Still too expensive. But there's nothing cheaper."

Talking about the future, Luo Hui sighed on the other end of the phone. "There's nowhere left to settle anymore."

3. Wang Liang (pseudonym), spa owner, 33

Wang Liang and a friend ran a spa in Xinjian Village, Xihongmen Township, Daxing District. On November 25 he drove up and stopped at the door. It was 3 p.m. Every shop around the spa was shuttered.

A dull mechanical rumble filled the air. Fifty meters away, two excavators were tearing down a building — nearly finished, leaving only a pile of rubble. Two hoses sprayed water on the site to keep the dust down. Fifteen or twenty people watched from across the road.

Three scrap collectors came by, calling out as they went. Seeing Wang Liang open the door, they asked whether he wanted to sell his air conditioners. Wang Liang said: "No."

He had come to collect things. He took the air conditioners off the wall and loaded them into the trunk of a small pickup — and the trunk was full. He still had a great deal left inside that he wasn't taking: beds, reclining chairs, blankets, a somewhat power-hungry water heater, the bar counter — all useful while the business was running, now even a hassle to get rid of. He tried selling the blankets to the scrap collectors. They weren't interested.

Wang Liang had come to Beijing with his father at age three. On the clearance campaign, he said he'd seen similar things before, but never anything like this.

"I ran this shop with a few partners, and I have other businesses besides. But what about the people who have nothing else? The shop had three or four employees — they're all gone now. It's not that we didn't want to keep them; there was just no way. Some went straight home. They're told they can't work here, and they can't work anywhere else either."

"The shop next door — they've moved four times this year. I asked the owner why he still hadn't left. He said he had nowhere to go."

"In the four or five days before this, you didn't see it — the street was full of people carrying things, ready to leave. At night, people slept in their cars on both sides of the road."

"Around here in Daxing, a two-bedroom that used to rent for 3,000 yuan has gone up to 4,800. Say someone earns 10,000 a month — they spend half on rent. What's left if they also have a wife and kids?"

"The SF Express courier who used to deliver here — his wife and one-year-old had just come to Beijing the day before the fire. They both died in it. He survived."

"This whole area has to come down — even buildings with property certificates. It was always going to be demolished; it was scheduled for next year anyway. The fire just sped it up."

"The building next door is about to come down because it's four stories. They built it this summer specifically to raise their demolition payout. This is a village — all of this is homestead land. Our landlord is a subletter; he rented a lot of properties and leased them out."

Just then two people from the landlord's side came over and asked how the move was going. The spa owner said: "Almost done — just the air conditioner left."

"Don't Cut the Power to the Cold Cabinets" — Four Small Business Owners

1. Xia, supermarket owner, nearly 40

Mr. Xia ran one of Xinjian Village's largest supermarkets — a Hualian outlet of 1,200 square meters that had just finished five months of renovation and reopened. The "grand opening" banners were still up inside.

The fire department's 48-hour deadline had already passed, and he still had one last truckload to finish. Out front on the ground sat cases of Want Want milk, crocks of baijiu, and bottles of Nestlé mineral water; one row of shelves against the wall still held some bread. Whenever a villager walked in, someone inside quickly ushered them back out.

Mr. Xia had come to Beijing from Zhejiang in 2002 and had run supermarkets for fifteen years. His first store was in the Shangdi Science Park; later he opened one in Miyun. The Shangdi store closed in 2014 due to demolition; that same year, he opened this Xinjian Village location, which netted over a million yuan a year after staff costs. This year he had put more than three million yuan into the renovation. After reopening, he started a membership program, which had reached 4,000 members. "Some of the local villagers who are staying asked me about their memberships — I told them there's no store, so what membership?" he said. In a corner by the entrance, promotional flyers were still stacked up. A middle-aged woman who had come to help said she was taking a handful to wrap flowerpots for the move.

After November 21, fire safety officers had pulled Mr. Xia and all the supermarket staff outside. The power was cut and no one was allowed in. "I just told them: the one thing I ask is don't cut the power to my cold cabinets. Of course they didn't care about that."

The next evening, Mr. Xia was finally allowed back in. The dumplings and meat in the freezers had started to spoil; the ice cream had melted. They were given notice: everything out within 48 hours. "They said our fire safety was non-compliant — running a business on the ground floor with people living above. But we didn't know that was a problem." He added: "We'd been operating here for four years, and all our permits were in order."

He moved all the merchandise to a warehouse. A few employees willing to follow him to Hebei would go to his new, not-yet-opened store there, which already had shelving and freezers — so what to do with the fixtures here remained undecided.

Mr. Xia was constantly on the phone; his new Hebei supermarket was in the final stage of renovation. His wife and the shop assistants kept repeating: "Telling you won't help — what can you actually solve?"

A supermarket in Xinjian Village, left in disarray

2. A restaurant owner, age unknown

The restaurant was in Sanjianfang Village, just across the river from Xinjian Village. The owner said that because she hadn't restocked, she couldn't make potato strips or lotus-root strips. The garment factories in the village had all been told to close and move out within ten days. She said business now had to go one day at a time — she didn't dare lay in stock.

This Hubei home-cooking restaurant had been in Sanjianfang Village for four years. The whiteboard on the wall listed the day's specials: smoked pork rib hot pot, free-range chicken hot pot, red amaranth. The prices were not cheap — the signature smoked pork rib hot pot was 90 yuan; stir-fried dried radish with bacon was 28 yuan. Between six and seven o'clock, all seven tables were full. The owner waited on the customers herself, and spent most of the time helping out in the kitchen too.

Before long, she said, she would be heading back to her hometown. "I'll come back and have a look after the New Year."

3. A Chinese restaurant owner, around 40

On the morning of November 24, more than a hundred people showed up. "Some were in uniforms, some weren't — I can't quite remember. They came and smashed up the shop — the glass door at the entrance, and the two big windows on the sides. Smashed them to pieces. They didn't go inside."

The restaurant was in chaos. A few wooden chairs remained, tipped over on the floor. There was a lot of rubbish on the ground, including fresh vegetables — half a pumpkin had fallen there. Near the kitchen, facing the entrance, hung a bunch of plastic bags.

The owner was gathering things, ducking into a room with an open window to look for plastic bags, packing up what was in his hands, then taking the whole bunch of bags too.

By around 2 p.m. on November 24, they had roughly packed up and set everything at the entrance — right on top of the broken glass. They planned to move to Hebei. For now, just hauling things there to store; no idea what came next.

4. Zhang Rong (pseudonym), foot massage owner, 36

Zhang Rong was from Henan. A year earlier, she and her husband had opened a foot massage shop across from the garment company "Luxury Times Group." At 1 p.m. on the 24th, the shop's iron gate and steel-frame entrance had already been smashed to pieces. The entire glass storefront was gone, exposing two bunk beds inside. Shards of glass lay mixed with clothes and household items on the floor. On the wall still hung a piece of calligraphy bearing the line from the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Collection: "a gentle and pleasant breeze." The couple were busy moving; the truck was already loaded with furniture and kitchenware. Several relatives were carrying out the battered furniture to throw away.

Zhang Rong came to Beijing in 2007. One son had gone into the military; another was in middle school in Beijing. She and her husband first ran a fruit stall on South Xiaojie in Jiugong, Daxing. In April 2011, a fire broke out on South Xiaojie and the fire department cleared the area; they moved to Xinjian Village and went on selling. By 2016 they had saved seven or eight hundred thousand yuan and felt "life had begun to look up," so they used that money to lease a shop of over 100 square meters and renovated it into a foot massage parlor. Three or four relatives came from their hometown to help, and everyone lived in the shop.

Zhang Rong had never received any eviction notice. At four or five in the morning on the 24th, about a dozen guards broke down the door, dragged them out of bed, and pushed them outside, without explaining why — just "get out, hurry, get out." A refrigerator, water dispenser, and other valuables were carried off. The water heater was spared — too hard to rip out on the spot.

The packing was nearly done. Two scrap collectors came by, looking for anything worth taking. One eyed the water heater, heard the asking price was 100 yuan, thought it too much, and turned to leave; a few relatives pulled him inside to smoke and bargain. The other, from Hebei, had once run a rental-apartment business in Daxing but had been evicted and relocated to Gu'an, Hebei, where he hoped to start over; he wanted cheap furniture and was likewise pulled inside to smoke and bargain.

Zhang Rong planned to load up her middle-school son and drive the ten-plus hours straight back to her hometown in Henan. "Beijing doesn't want us anymore. We're like refugees — what's the difference between us and beggars? Let's go. Let's just go."

"The Waitstaff All Went Out to Look for Housing" — Five People from the Service Trades

A forklift still moving things in the dead of night

1. Master Wang, Xinjian Village moving company, 33

Master Wang owned a small truck and said he had been moving people in Xinjian for several years. The day after the fire, he packed up his own things and moved to Nanhai Jiayuan, not far from Xinjian Village, into a proper two-bedroom.

"Moving prices have all gone up these past few days — some people are charging 450 yuan for trips into the city and people still take them. I don't have the heart to raise mine. It feels wrong to profit off this. Anyway, there's so much work right now I can't keep up."

For moves from Xinjian Village into the city, he charged 300 yuan a trip. "That price is fair. A lot of people are moving these days — trips to Huangzhuang are already 150 to 200. Going into the city takes at least three hours either way; 300 is cheap." If people needed help getting rid of scrap too, he promised to handle it — but at "very low prices." And: "Don't ask too many questions. Someone will come collect it."

2. Master Zhu, scrap collector, 31

Master Zhu's phone number was still spray-painted in black on a wall on the eastern side of Xinjian Village. The wall was less than 100 meters from the apartment where the fire started. When we dialed that number at 9:30 p.m. on November 25, he was at the long-distance bus station with his wife and daughter, about to head back to his hometown in Henan.

His scrap yard had been demolished. "It was already being cleaned up before — this whole area is old housing slated for demolition. They'd been talking about it for years, but the brigade wasn't in a rush. Then the fire happened, and the government said everyone had to be gone within a few days. The shop was torn down. No more business. I'm going home for the New Year. The scrap trade in Beijing is finished — there's nowhere to pile things." he said.

The scrap yard had previously sat in a courtyard flat in Xinjian First Village.

"Yesterday someone came and tore the whole scrap yard down. Wednesday, the brigade and the landlord said it had to come down this week — pack up and move. Thursday the brigade came to inspect it. Friday morning it was all gone."

"With this 40-day inspection now, all the scrap yards nearby have been shut down. There's no way to operate. Figure it out after the New Year. Who knows."

He mentioned that two other people could still collect scrap, because they had some "yard space" elsewhere. "They don't want too much either — what you'd have gotten 100 yuan for before, you'd get 10 for now. You might as well just give your stuff away."

3. Ms. Yang, real estate agent, around 30

On the walls of Xinjian Village, slips of paper bearing Ms. Yang's phone number had been posted: "Apartments for rent — move in with bags packed." The slips were new.

She said she worked for a legitimate agency in Gu'an County, though she was reluctant to say which one — only that it was a local agency in Gu'an, Hebei. A few days earlier, she had seen news of the fire and the government clearances, and figured many people had been left without housing. So on November 20, they came to Xinjian Village to post their listings, and hadn't been back since.

Gu'an County is about 30 kilometers south of Xinjian Village, already inside Langfang, Hebei Province — about two and a half hours from central Beijing by car.

"The apartments there are all newly built. People from Xinjian have been trickling in these past few days. Yesterday I got a call from a client; I sent him photos of the apartment in the afternoon, and he said he'd come with his things the next day. Don't worry — the apartments here are very nice. Brand-new complexes."

4. Gao Tao, Meituan delivery rider, 35

Gao Tao was a friend of Wang Liang, the spa owner. On November 24, when Wang Liang went to the shop to remove the air conditioners and wrap up the clearance, Gao Tao and another friend came to help. Gao Tao didn't live in Xinjian Village, but he had also been evicted and was now staying with a friend.

He was a Meituan delivery rider in Daxing District, living in Beijing while his wife and children stayed in his hometown. He said: "There are over 200 Meituan riders in Daxing. Over the past few days, roughly 180 of them have been looking for housing."

He had earlier told Wang Liang that while making deliveries lately, he had seen people crying inside their homes — women holding children.

When we raised this with him directly, he confirmed it: "Absolutely. Over in Haizijiao in Daxing — that area alone had more than 20 apartment buildings. Figure 400 people per building. Where do you find places for that many people? I personally saw two or three families in tears. Their wages and their rent don't add up anymore. Working is basically losing money."

"The agents are having a field day right now. Last night, agents were signing leases until midnight. Places like Wo Ai Wo Jia and Lianjia — whether you rent or not, there's a queue behind you."

"I'm at my friend's place for now, as long as it lasts. Housing is so expensive. I asked about a small second bedroom today — how much? 1,800 yuan. In Huangcun. One month's deposit, three months upfront. It used to be eight or nine hundred, a thousand at most. Go to a Lianjia agent in Huangcun and say you want to rent — there's nothing. Nothing even if you know someone."

"Yesterday I went to the Meizhou Dongpo Daxing branch — the waitstaff didn't show up for the afternoon shift. They had all gone out to look for apartments. I pick up orders there every day. Yesterday there were just a few cooks and a few runners left. They have something like 200 waitstaff. (Verified: the Meizhou Dongpo Daxing branch has over 100 waitstaff.)"

5. A construction-materials worker, 33

He was from Fujian. He came to Beijing in 2008 to trade in construction materials. He had moved many times, generally following the construction sites. He had three children — 13, 10, and 6. The eldest had stayed in his hometown, looked after by his parents; the younger two were with him, and his wife was a full-time homemaker.

He said the construction-materials business had no reliable income — his monthly average was around 8,000 yuan. "But with purchase restrictions these past two years, construction materials have been hard to do. I've been feeling like it's getting hard to hold on. I've thought about leaving Beijing, but looking at the situation across the country, everywhere is pretty much the same."

At the start of this year, he and his wife had factored in the children's schooling and moved from Zhangyicun in Fengtai to Hailan Apartments in Xinjian Village, Xihongmen, Daxing. After the Jufuyuan fire on November 19, he got no eviction notice. But at around 9 a.m. on the 24th, shortly after getting up, dozens of guards came in and swept people out. The two of them frantically found a van. The most valuable thing in it was a refrigerator; everything else was household goods, clothes, and cooking oil.

A truck loaded with luggage and household goods

Their plan was to move the odds and ends first to the storage room of a Fujianese acquaintance who ran a timber workshop, then look for housing. At 3:40 p.m. on the 25th, he sent two videos. The footage showed another apartment complex — hallways strewn with belongings, people carrying things out. This was Tianhe Jiayuan in Tuanhunan Village. "They said we could stay here first, but then we moved over and they said no apartment buildings were allowed either. Some buildings apparently heard people were coming from Xinjian Village and called it bad luck. We don't know where to go now."

At 4 p.m., he and his wife found temporary shelter with his uncle, who lived in Jiugong, Daxing — in an actual apartment building, untouched by the demolitions. "Not looking for anything more this year. I'll think about it after the New Year," he wrote on WeChat.

"No Qualifications" — One NGO

Near the western side of Xinjian Village, an apartment building with an evacuation notice on its glass door. It sat just outside the village proper, so its deadline was a little less urgent.

Anonymous, NGO director, 43

Because he was under considerable pressure, he asked that both he and his organization stay anonymous.

He was from Hunan. He and his wife came to Beijing in 2009; their 10-year-old son had stayed in the hometown, in the care of his older brother and sister-in-law.

In March 2017, he opened a free mutual-aid space for migrant workers on the outskirts of Beijing, supported mainly by public donations with no other income. "You can play ping-pong, borrow books for free, anyone who can fix appliances helps fix them, anyone with time helps look after the kids."

On the afternoon of November 24, around 3 or 4 p.m., he posted on WeChat Moments and through his official account offering free help to "migrant worker friends in Beijing" — saying he could store belongings, provide basic lodging, and arrange free transport for moves.

After the post went up, he got few calls — and no one actually showed up without housing. But around 9 or 10 p.m., he got a call from the local police station, telling him he lacked the qualifications to take people in. They told him to cancel the event. By November 25, calls for help began coming in. He could only turn them away.

He then decided to switch to simply helping people find moving vehicles. But even that couldn't last. The "relevant authorities" came to his door again, announcing they were shutting down the migrant workers' mutual-aid space — likewise on the grounds that it "lacked qualifications."

The director said he would look into applying for proper qualifications next.

"Too Hasty" — Three Xinjian Village Locals

1. A former water, electricity, and heating plant worker, in his 50s

At 4 p.m. on November 25, at the Jinye Street intersection in Xinjian Village, he stood by the roadside — now and then trading words with a scrap-collecting tricyclist stuck at the junction, or with an old neighbor passing by, but mostly just standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, watching.

He said this village was a settlement village. In 1956, when their houses were being taken, eight villages from Changping were relocated here together. "Many of them were anti-Japanese war veterans. When we were children, they always told us stories." He recalled: "Look at how all these roads run in perfect grids — nothing like an ordinary village."

In earlier days, villagers had worked at nearby factories. But the heating and plumbing plant where he had once worked was long gone.

As for the workers and garment factories now streaming out of the village, he said they had arrived gradually over the past ten-odd years. Before they came, with no one renting, Xinjian Village had far fewer second-floor additions. Now homes with homestead lots of one or two hundred square meters had all built two-story extensions — the ground floor rented to factories or shops, the upper floors turned into high-density rentals.

He himself had no such property to rent, and he didn't like all the illegal building in the village. But watching the stream of people rushing to move on the final day of the three-day deadline, he repeated it several times: "Too hasty. Too hasty."

As he talked, a neighbor who clearly knew him well came over and mentioned he had run out of salt at home and had just gotten half a packet from the brigade. Another elderly neighbor came by carrying a case of instant noodles — the "Tomato Noodle Xitang" brand — and said that at the big supermarket being cleared out a few hundred meters away, that was the only food left.

The main street of the village — almost no one left to be seen

2. Head of the Xinjian Fourth Village Clinic, in her 50s or 60s

5 p.m. on November 25. The Xinjian Fourth Village Clinic was one of the few storefronts still operating normally with its signage intact.

The medicines on the shelves behind the counter were sparse and spread thin. Walking in, the most visible items were cold medicines — also the best sellers here. The woman in charge said that because this was the production brigade's clinic, she didn't have to leave.

She said she was a local; she had once worked at the county hospital, and after retiring her health had declined. But without a city household registration, she had no health insurance. The hospital director had helped her get a license to run a subsidized pharmacy.

"Subsidized" meant selling at cost — whatever the purchase price, that was the selling price, no markup. Her current income came from the hospital's monthly subsidy of 3,500 yuan: 1,400 yuan was paid reliably every month; the rest depended on performance metrics, including how much medicine she stocked each month. Now she had largely stopped restocking — with the tenants gone, no one came to see a doctor.

On the counter sat a bag of eggs, some vegetables, and a bag of meat, brought over by a neighbor from a nearby village. Xinjian Village now had no food vendors left.

The clinic was still open; the supermarket had nothing left on its shelves

3. Liu Limin (pseudonym), local Xinjian Village resident, 45

On November 24, near the Jufuyuan Apartment where the fire had broken out, Liu Limin's son-in-law said their home's door "had just been broken down that afternoon."

Liu Limin's family lived in the "Second Brigade" of Xinjian Village, in a three-story building. A family of six — Liu Limin and his wife, their daughter and son-in-law, and two granddaughters — lived on the top floor; the first and second floors were rented out. The day after the November 18 fire, the village committee demanded that tenants be cleared out within three days. Water and electricity were cut on the 19th, so by the 22nd the floors were empty, and they locked up the first and second floors.

In 1955, Liu Limin's father had been among the first residents relocated from Changping to this site. In 1990, the village allotted homestead land to families with sons; Liu Limin received 4 fen (14 by 14 meters). In 2003, the Xihongmen Township government appropriated land and set up a company called "Wulianhuan Real Estate," which took over roughly 4,000 mu of land in the Fourth Brigade. The terms proposed at the time were: "each household receives 1,000 yuan in profit per mu per year, rising 30% a year" — but the increase stopped at 6,000 yuan and never went higher. According to the villagers, this money was never actually paid. Liu Limin recalled that around 2010, Wulianhuan was listing the land at "20,000 yuan per mu per year," and later increases were never disclosed.

Around 2009, garment factories began moving gradually from inside the Third Ring Road out to the Sixth Ring Road. According to Liu Limin, one reason was that garment factories in Beijing were multiplying, and another was a fire in April 2011 on South Xiaojie in Jiugong, Daxing. "A lot of people died in that one too, and it was cleared by the fire department afterward." Liu Limin added two floors to his own building, renting out the first and second and keeping the third for his family. The first floor — 180 square meters — was leased to a garment factory owner for 20,000 yuan a year.

Liu Limin had worked at a supply cooperative in his early years. When it closed, he started driving a taxi. To spend more time with his granddaughters, he switched for a while to Bus Route 29, but not for long. Two years ago, Xinjian Village began hiring large numbers of casual guards — "over a hundred" — all in black uniforms that looked somewhat ill-fitting. Villagers called them "ergouzi" (lackeys). While driving the bus, Liu Limin would often run into the cook who made meals for the guards. The cook said: "The rules say guards get paid three or four thousand yuan, but in practice they only take home two or three thousand — somebody higher up is probably skimming."

Liu Limin's wife and daughter-in-law looked after the children at home; his son worked as a guard in the village. Rental income was still the family's main source of income.

According to Liu Limin, at around 4 p.m. on November 24, his family was watching television on the third floor when they suddenly heard someone banging on the door downstairs. A guard came up asking "is everyone out?" then kept banging for a while before leaving. There was a security camera on the second floor, but no hard drive in the computer, so there was no playback.

Liu Limin's wife showed us three documents. The first was a Letter to Village Residents, bearing the seal of the Xihongmen Township Xinjian First Village Residents' Committee, dated October 31. It stated: "Our township launched the shantytown renovation project across all four Xinjian villages on September 28, 2017; preliminary baseline surveys, household registrations, and data analysis have been completed." It went on: "In accordance with the 2017 Beijing Rural Winter Clean Heating Work Plan and other relevant documents, the entire city is required to go coal-free this year. Because of the shantytown renovation, all four Xinjian villages have not implemented the 'coal-to-clean-energy' conversion... To ensure that residents have adequate heating this winter, and in connection with the shantytown renovation, all residents are asked to clear out their tenants and terminate rental agreements promptly, find transitional housing quickly, and move as soon as possible. For villagers who register to move before November 15, 2017, a transitional fee will be prepaid in two tiers: for those who clear out tenants AND dismantle coal-burning heating, 100,000 yuan per courtyard; for those who only dismantle coal-burning heating without clearing tenants, 80,000 yuan per courtyard."

The second document was a Prepaid Transitional Fee Agreement. Liu Limin's wife had underlined in red the clause requiring "the demolition and handover of all above-ground structures and attachments within the project scope."

Villagers were deeply unhappy with the term "transitional fee." Most of those present had not yet signed. "'Transitional fee of 100,000 yuan' — meaning you find your own place to rent first, and then the 100,000 gets deducted from the demolition payout. Who knows whether you'll even get paid once the buildings are gone, or how you'll be resettled." On top of that, the deadline to vacate had originally been stated as October 2018 but was later moved up to March 2018. Villagers felt this was done to cut demolition payouts, because under new rules taking effect in 2018, compensation rates would rise again.

Liu Limin said: "The demolition was first mentioned in August, but it still hadn't started by October. Meanwhile, village cadres were hauling in building materials and adding stories to their own houses, trying to squeeze more out of the demolition payout." Another villager said: "When Wulianhuan was set up, they came to requisition our land. They told us we were basically shareholders and would get annual dividends. Now they're having us sign agreements with Wulianhuan to evict ourselves — what does that even mean?"

The third document was the shantytown renovation schedule shared to the Xinjian Second Village WeChat group: 1. September 28 – October 15, 2017: household surveys and registration; 2. October 16–31: village and township authorities to verify land-use rights, draw up compensation plans and resettlement housing designs; 3. November 1–15: pre-signing preparations, preliminary household talks; 4. November 16 – December 15: formal contract signing; 5. December 16–25: archival work by all departments; 6. December 26 – January 31: property selection and final settlement.

The November 18 fire disrupted that plan — and accelerated it.

"Four or Five Hundred Air Conditioners, All Told" — Three People Outside Daxing

Elsewhere in Beijing, beyond Daxing, the "major inspection, clean-up, and enforcement" campaign was playing out across the city at the same time. We document those cases here as well:

1. Apartment manager at Shuxin Apartments, 50

Shuxin Apartments stood in Nanyuan Hongfangzi Village, Fengtai District, at the intersection of Wuaitun East Street and Nanyuan West Road, right next to a Super 8 Hotel. From the outside it looked like a billiards hall. But walk up to the second floor and you immediately found a winding corridor and a string of small rooms. A water-and-electricity cut-off notice on the wall was the first clue to this mysterious space's name: "Shuxin Apartments."

A notice posted outside Shuxin Apartments gave residents until November 25 to vacate voluntarily, bearing the seal of "Nanyuan Village Committee, November 15." But according to residents, the notice wasn't posted until around the 20th, and many people hadn't noticed it. At noon, the building manager called them to say they had to be out that evening.

A notice to vacate quickly, posted on a wall in Houchang Village, northwest Beijing

On November 24, a crew of forty to fifty people from the Nanyuan Brigade came three times through the day — at 10 a.m., 3 p.m., and 8 p.m. — driving out residents and breaking down doors. Every room in the building was now without a door; the panels lay scattered in the corridors or had fallen inside the rooms.

The scenes inside showed how suddenly people had been forced to leave — like refugees fleeing.

With the electricity cut, everything was pitch black; you needed a flashlight to see. Some tables still held soy sauce, vinegar, and half-eaten jars of chili sauce, chopsticks still sticking out of the jars; quilts on beds still held the shape of someone curled inside; slippers and umbrellas left behind, scattered on the floor. In a room that seemed to have been a young woman's, balloons on the wall spelled out "happy," the walls papered in pink, a jigsaw-puzzle fairy-tale castle hung up — but the floor was covered in discarded clothes and spilled raisins. Another room, which the manager said had been rented by a male white-collar office worker, was unlike the others: clean, nothing left behind, the walls covered in fortune characters and more than a dozen couplets.

Street-level shops after tenants moved out, photographed in Xinjian First Village

The building manager was 50 and declined to give her name. She said she had only come the year before from her hometown of Hulunbuir to help out a fellow townsperson. That townsperson had run a chain of 4S car dealerships back home and made some money, then came to Beijing to get into the rental-housing business. Around 2008, he sublet this vacant three-story building, first turning it into an entertainment complex with a billiards room and an ice rink, then a few years later adding partitions on the second and third floors to create shared housing. Rents ran from 350 to 700 yuan per room, each unit about 10 square meters. A total of 60 to 70 households lived there, mostly young single migrant workers and some middle-aged couples.

By 9 p.m., the building was nearly empty — only four people left with nowhere to go. The manager let them stay one night, but they had to be out by 5 a.m. One crew-cut middle-aged man was downstairs waiting to help a couple move, but he didn't know where they were headed either. "They probably haven't figured it out yet. They'll think as they go."

2. Two Shandong men collecting air conditioners, in their 30s

At 9:30 p.m. on the night of November 24, the third floor of Shuxin Apartments in Nanyuan Hongfangzi Village, Fengtai District, was completely cleared out, the power cut, nothing visible. Amid the debris scattered on the floor, only two men in work uniforms were still at it.

One was tall and solidly built. He had just pulled an air conditioner out of a room and was crouching on the floor, untangling the long white duct trailing behind it. A harsh white headlamp was strapped to his forehead; his face was blackened with grime, only his eyes and the lamp above equally bright. The other, younger and slighter, had hair sticking up every which way; he leaned sideways against a red fire-extinguisher box in the corridor, the back of his uniform reading "Zijinghua Air Conditioning Repair."

Both spoke with Shandong accents. They said they had been in Beijing seven or eight years and had never seen a mass displacement on this scale. Since the Xihongmen fire on the 19th, they had collected four to five hundred air conditioning units in all, mostly from the villages around Xinjian Village where the fire had broken out, at around 300 yuan each.

"We collected them not knowing whether we can even sell them. A lot of scrap recycling stations have been shut down too. I can try selling online, but if that doesn't work, we'll have to offload them in Hebei — everyone's going to Hebei now." The taller man said this, then hoisted an air conditioner onto his back and disappeared through the third-floor doorway.

A man weighing whether to remove his air conditioner, photographed in Guojiachang Village, Chaoyang District

3. An SF Express courier, 28

He also lived in Shuxin Apartments.

He had come to Beijing from Shanxi two years earlier; courier work was his first job after arriving. His monthly pay was decent — 7,000 to 8,000 yuan. But he was frugal: he had rented a 700-yuan room with its own bathroom, and hadn't moved once in two years, because "the SF Express depot in Nanyuan is right across from the apartments, and the rent here hardly ever goes up — only 50 yuan in two years." His demands on housing were minimal; as long as he could sleep, that was enough. His hours were long as it was — 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Knowing he would have to move out first thing in the morning, he was frantically searching for a place on his phone, still in his red-and-black uniform. But every nearby hotel was full. "Rooms that used to be 100 yuan a night have jumped to 300, and now you can't even find those."

"Feel Free to Take the Cats" — Six People Outside Daxing

1. A Meituan delivery rider, around 25

Houchang Village in Beijing's Haidian District was famous a few years ago as the "Didi Village" — across from the Baidu technology campus. Back then it was home to a large number of out-of-town drivers earning money on the Didi platform.

In Houchang Village, an unnamed Meituan rider told us the clearances had begun in the first half of 2017. He said: "That row of flat buildings at the village entrance has been sealed off — they all belonged to the brigade. Before, they were divided into small rooms and rented to outsiders. This year the buildings were sealed, and the people living there have been moving out gradually."

In front of several flat buildings, we saw seal notices — the earliest dated April, the most recent November 21. On the walls along Houchang Village's streets, many eviction-registration notices were posted, telling landlords to terminate shared-housing leases and process the move-out paperwork promptly.

"Most of the Didi drivers here have already left. After the ride-hailing rules came out last year, nobody here was doing Didi anymore. The ones who are still here have gone into moving and cargo delivery."

"Those who could move, have moved this year," he said — and then he left, too.

Xinjian Third Village, in the early hours of November 25

2. Mr. Zhang, Didi premium driver, 25

The night of November 25, on the road from Daxing back to Guomao.

Mr. Zhang was born in 1992 and grew up around Shijiazhuang. The past few days, he and his wife had been staying at a friend's hair salon — sleeping a few hours on a fold-out couch each morning after finishing the night shift around 10, then going out to look for housing, and starting to drive again in the afternoon.

A week earlier, he and his wife had been living together in a shared apartment in Tiantongyuan. On November 22, the landlord told all 70 households that they had received notice and had to be out by the next day.

He wasn't happy with the living conditions there — the doors were only 1.5 meters apart, and the landlord was hard to deal with; he'd had to hand over two cartons of Zhonghua cigarettes just to get a simple temporary residence permit. But it was cheap: 800 yuan a month, plus 200 a month for winter heating.

Before that, he'd had better days.

At just 25, Mr. Zhang had already worked in Beijing for over eight years. For the first two years, he worked at his uncle's glass factory, saved up 20,000 yuan, and bought a BYD F3 to run a black cab in Xihongmen. Then he used what he made from that to upgrade to a Honda CRV.

Somewhere along the way, Mr. Zhang spent three months trying his luck as a film extra. Every day he waited at the gate of the Beijing Film Academy; if a van came and took him to a set, he'd earn 30 yuan and a boxed meal.

The turning point came in 2015, when he opened a neighborhood convenience store — only to be told a few months later it would be demolished. In the rush to close, he returned some goods, sold the rest at a loss, and ended up 20,000 yuan in the red.

The next year, he spent over 60,000 yuan on a used, out-of-province Hyundai Reina to drive Didi Express, but within a year Beijing began banning ride-hailing vehicles with out-of-province plates. He sold it at another loss of over 20,000 yuan.

Since April this year, Mr. Zhang had been driving a leased car for Didi's premium service. After the 6,000-yuan monthly lease and fuel costs, he cleared roughly 6,000 yuan a month. And lately he had been eyeing a two-bedroom in Xin'anli, Huangcun, Daxing — now listed at 2,800 yuan a month.

"Old building — no double-glazed windows." He was still weighing it.

Although he said he had long since lost his early affection for Beijing, he still wanted to stay as long as he could. "A lot of the middle-aged people leaving are doing odd jobs. If you suddenly leave now, none of us knows where to go. After years here, even if it's far, even if it's expensive, Beijing is the only option."

Lately, Mr. Zhang had listed his Honda CRV on Guazi Used Cars. It still hadn't sold.

Cars left in Xinjian Village, all being used to haul belongings

3. A Guoduomei fruit-store employee, around 20

We came across him on November 23 near the Puhuangyu subway station, at a Guoduomei fruit shop.

He had been cleared out of his apartment the day before. He had been living in the 111 Cultural Industry Park — a complex near the Third Ring Road, southeast of the National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts — which had three or four apartment buildings inside, and where many of Guoduomei's dormitories were. On November 21, the complex issued a notice that residents had to vacate; by 6 p.m. on the 22nd, no one would be allowed in and the doors would be sealed.

"We moved out yesterday." Now they had moved into other Guoduomei dormitories.

4. A staff member at Hongfangzi Nursing Home, age unknown

Hongfangzi Nursing Home was northeast of Nanyuan Airport in Fengtai District.

On November 26, a post on Douban reported that Hongfangzi Nursing Home would be relocating.

On the afternoon of November 26, when we called the nursing home, a staff member said they were no longer accepting new residents because the home was scheduled for demolition. Under the plan, Hongfangzi Nursing Home was already slated to come down — the site was to be turned into green space, with demolition set for the following year. But the fire at Xinjian Village had moved the timeline up.

5. A restaurant owner, around 40

At 1 p.m. on November 25, in Guojiachang Village in Tongzhou District, just outside the Fifth Ring Road, this "Chengdu Snacks" shop was one of the few still open, with a banner outside reading "Open as Usual."

Most shops on the street had already posted closure notices requiring them to vacate by November 30; some had been sealed, with notices dated November 24.

The restaurant had a business license and had not yet been sealed, though a "Ten Fire Safety Prohibitions" notice had been posted on the door. License or not, the woman who owned it didn't know how long she could keep going. She said she had come to Beijing in 1995 and never left. "Keep it open for now," she said, tallying up a bill.

The apartment she had been renting — behind the snack shop — was no longer permitted for living in. On the 25th, they had quickly found a new place nearby, in another apartment building a hundred meters from the shop.

The new apartment was dense like the urban villages of Guangzhou — buildings packed wall to wall. Rents ran from 400 to 1,000 yuan, with no rooms offering a private bathroom.

The apartment door was covered in fire safety notices; the most recent, dated November 20, was handwritten by the landlord: an important notice that a comprehensive 40-day inspection was under way, and that electric blankets, gas canisters, and fast-boil kettles were all banned.

This year, the area had been required to switch from coal to gas. Coal heating was banned; the small coal sheds that used to stand outside the buildings had been sealed long ago. One landlord said that once you moved in, if you wanted to stay warm, you had to buy a proper heater — the simple "little sun" radiant type was not allowed.

Outside the shop were two cats — one eating, one perched on an iron rack watching the road. They had been left behind by a neighboring shop when it moved away, and the owners had casually taken to feeding them. The male owner, smoking outside, said: if anyone wanted to take the cats, they were welcome to.

6. Beibei (pseudonym), social-commerce seller, 22

Beibei lived in an apartment building in Zhangjiawan, Tongzhou.

On November 22, she wrote on social media: "Police are giving us three days before they force-clear the apartment. The landlord says it's fine — waiting to see what happens in three days. Hoping it won't be too bad."

On November 23, she said no one in their building had moved out yet. She was a little worried: what if the landlord refused to refund deposits? That day, she liked a post on social media that read: "I'm too worldly for this. I don't have the courage to resist when life falls apart around me — like this forced eviction of Beijing apartments. Reading about it still makes my heart skip. Spiritual sustenance can no longer give me peace. Only tangible, material things feel secure."

On November 24, Beibei did not reply to messages.

On the afternoon of November 25, Beibei replied: "Our landlord is still holding on. But there's still no electricity."

What Happened

A satellite overview of Xinjian Village and the location of the fire

At 6 p.m. on November 18, a fire broke out at Jufuyuan Apartment in Xinjian Village, Xihongmen Township, Daxing District, Beijing, killing 19 people.

On November 19, the commercial street along the northern edge of Xinjian Village — Dadao Dingye Street — was demolished.

On November 20 and 21, landlords began telling tenants to move out. Some said they had to be out by the 23rd; others set the deadline at the 27th.

On November 24, water and electricity were cut to the street-facing shops in Xinjian First Village.

November 29: the final deadline for tenants in the new apartment buildings on the western side of Xinjian Village to vacate.