Dispatches from Xinjian Village, November 27

The village has a ceremonial gate at both its south and west entrances. The outward-facing side bears the village's name, "Xinjian Village"; the inward-facing side is carved with four characters: "safe passage in and out."

Xinjian Village is still a focal point.

Nine days have passed since the fire. Beijing's 40-day campaign to "sweep out safety hazards, clear them away, and set things right" has spread across the city.

On the afternoon of November 26, the Beijing Municipal Safety Commission held a press conference to address concerns from across the public. It stood by the crackdown while admitting that "isolated" cases had been handled in a "crude and heavy-handed" way. On November 27, the press also reported that Beijing Party Secretary Cai Qi had visited Xihongmen Town in Daxing District several times and stressed "human care."

On the afternoon of the 27th, we returned to Xinjian Village and walked through the Third, Fourth, and Second sub-villages.

"If We Don't Cut the Power, How Are We Supposed to Demolish It?"

Not far from the village entrance, four men stood before a single-story building, looking up and directing a man on the roof who was about to saw through some electrical wires. A high-voltage box stood near him by a utility pole. He held two black cables, each about ten centimeters thick, working out where to make his cut.

"What are you doing? Why are you cutting the cables?"

They tensed at once and closed in: "What do you want?" The four men held their ground.

"Little sister, if we don't cut the power, how are we supposed to demolish this? Think how dangerous it would be," one of them said.

The room below had already been cleared out. The faded aluminum-frame glass door still bore lettering that marked it as a former aluminum-fabrication workshop.

"The Kindergarten Stays Open Through the End of the Month"

Passing Xinshiji Kindergarten, we came upon a parent waiting at the gate to collect a child.

After two or three minutes, a young woman brought the child out, handed her over, and told the parent: "Our kindergarten is only open through the end of the month. After that, we close." The parent didn't ask much, checked that the end of the month fell on a Thursday, and left with her child.

About ten children were left, the teacher said. "Before the demolitions started, there were fifty or sixty."

She looked very young. First she said she wasn't yet 20, then corrected herself and said she had just turned 20.

By the surviving signage, the kindergarten had been bilingual. She had been in Beijing less than a year — her first few months at another kindergarten, then transferred here by the principal. The principal owned several kindergartens, though she couldn't say where the others were.

Asked where she would go once the kindergarten closed, she said she would go back to her hometown.

"The kindergarten will just break up on the spot. When we leave at the end of the month, they'll pay out our wages." She left no phone number; since she was leaving, she had already cancelled her Beijing number, and these past few days she had kept in touch with her family entirely by video call.

Nearby stood another kindergarten, Congming House. A notice on its door, dated November 19, read: "Per instructions from above, this school is closed effective immediately."

"Two Days of Searching and Still No Place to Stay"

The supermarket was nearly bare. In a room that should have held four or five rows of shelves, only one remained, its goods thinly scattered. Every so often someone wandered in to see what was worth buying.

Behind a table at the entrance, the proprietor watched a video on a small tablet while his wife stood beside him.

"Are you locals or from out of town?"

"Out of town, of course — would a local end up like this?" He didn't look up, just tilted his head toward the shelves beside him.

They had spent two days searching and still found no place to stay. "Once we find somewhere, we'll move. There's no living in Beijing anymore. We're heading to Hebei."

"Did anyone give you a deadline to move out?"

"The deadline's long gone. Whenever he turns up, I just shut the door."

"Who? The landlord?"

"The landlord couldn't care less about this. It's the chengguan."

"We heard your water's been cut off?"

"We get by on bottled water." The proprietor jerked his chin toward a bare patch of floor where shelves should have stood; stacked packs of mineral water sat there instead.

Half an hour later I ran into them again. They were talking and laughing, working something out together as they headed deeper into the lane, for all the world an ordinary couple walking home after work.

"You Can't Cut Off the Next Generation's Living"

"Our side hasn't lost its water — never heard of that happening to us. It's the landlords' tenants who got cut off. The ones who rented their places out."

"They said they'd finish demolishing all this first, wait for all the out-of-towners to leave, and only then sit down to talk relocation." A few elderly locals explained it. One older woman said that to move now, each household would get 100,000 yuan — but only once the building was cleared and the power shut off.

"That money counts as a loan. Later it gets deducted. Meaning the final relocation payout has this advance taken out of it, as a prepaid resettlement fee."

"We can't leave. We're poor, with nowhere to go. Cash in hand flutters away and it's gone — and then aren't we still poor?"

The demolition these past few days had targeted illegal structures, they said — the prefab buildings with corrugated-steel roofs, the industrial zones. "The houses put up on public land probably won't all come down even by December." "Right up to the fire, they were still adding second and third stories."

"Our situation is different. Everything here has property rights and proper papers."

"After relocation, how much do you stand to get? Five million yuan?" we asked.

The old man thought it over and said: "Five million should be doable. Anything less and no one can move, no one will agree." The old woman added: "You can't cut off the next generation's living. This bit of housing is all our ancestors left us."

"How big is the place? Two hundred square meters, upstairs and down?"

The old man: "Two hundred? Eight hundred square meters!"

"Once the demolition's done and the money's paid, where will you live?"

The old woman: "We'll find somewhere ourselves. Then we'll come back — they say they're building apartment towers here, and each family gets several units."

"Those Three Fish Will Be Taken Along Too"

"No problem, I'm a Xinjian local — don't need navigation," said the Didi driver who took our return trip, over the phone.

On the way out of the village, we passed once more a spot we had already passed twice in recent days. The pink lighting still glowed exactly as before, and so did the fish tank in the ground-floor sitting room. The three koi inside were still there.

"Those fish should be taken along. There used to be a lot more — over ten of them." The homeowner was a distant relative of this Mr. Liu. "Next to that room is a bathhouse he rented out, and the floor above is rented out too. The west side of the upper floor — that's the koi room — is where his own family lived. They've already moved out, but they'll still come back for their things. They used to keep pigs, too, and a Tibetan mastiff. It bit the owner's face — more than three hundred stitches. He didn't dare deal with it himself; his son came back from the army and didn't dare either. In the end they brought in someone else to handle it and haul it off."

This was the first fare he'd picked up near home in several days, he said. He had moved a few things out but was still living in his house in Xinjian Village, going out to drive every day as usual. That afternoon, driving along, he got hungry, went home and cooked a little, then went back out — and hadn't driven two kilometers before he got this fare.

"Lately the only nuisance is buying vegetables. The power's still on, so I just head out to drive and come back. I find a supermarket along the way and pick up some vegetables to take home."

As we passed, the village cleaner, an older woman, was sweeping the fallen leaves in front of the gate spotless with a big broom.

Earlier that afternoon, when we first entered the village, several garment-factory workers on the main street were moving out, loading dismantled glass doors, trolleys, and cabinets onto a truck, getting ready to head for a temporary stop in Hebei.

They didn't look particularly downcast. One of them, who looked to be in his teens, I asked how long he'd been in Beijing. He grinned and said: "Forever!" Then he switched on a speaker and cranked it up loud.

His shorter, stockier companion said to him: "What are you, stupid? Forever? Then you wouldn't have to leave, would you?"

The cover image and all photos in this article were taken in Xinjian Village.