"Humane Care," and the 96 Extra Hours Picun Won

The media showed up, and the harshly worded notices came down.

Zhang Shuli got the news and raced to make a one o'clock flight out of Hohhot. Two hours earlier, his wife had called: the village had just posted a notice saying that "anyone who has not evacuated, vacated, or cleared out by 6 p.m. tonight will be deemed to have abandoned all belongings and will bear full responsibility for any losses or consequences. Water and electricity will be cut after dark; no one may stay overnight, and violators bear the consequences."

Zhang Shuli is 29 and works as a hardware architect at Beijing Qingshang Architectural Design and Research Institute, a subsidiary of Tsinghua Holdings. A month earlier he had moved into Jiaguan Apartments in Picun (皮村), Jinzhan Township, Chaoyang District, and he was happy with his new 20-square-meter home. His 9,000-yuan monthly salary was the family's only income, and here the rent was just 700 yuan a month, one month's deposit plus one month up front. The village committee and Picun's busiest main street were right across the road — safe and convenient. His wife and their eight-month-old finally seemed to have a real home — at least until the notice arrived.

This was Beijing. November 27.

A resident of one apartment unit loads packed luggage onto a moving truck

Picun is famous. It sits where Shunyi, Tongzhou, and Chaoyang Districts meet, with just over a thousand registered local villagers and more than 20,000 migrants. It is home to the Migrant Workers' Home (工友之家), a nonprofit founded in 2005. Under its influence, Picun built a New Workers' Theater, a library, a Migrant Workers' Culture and Art Museum, and Tongxin Experimental School, and launched the New Workers' Art Troupe along with "migrant-worker" cultural events like the "Migrant Workers' Spring Gala" and the "Land Folk Concert." This past April the village produced a sensation, Fan Yusu — a member of its literary group, a middle-aged woman from Hubei working as a nanny in Beijing. Her autobiographical essay I Am Fan Yusu, published in Jiemian's "Noon Stories" column, drew four million readers within three days.

Picun carries weight in intellectual and civil-society circles too. In 2012, CNTV shot a five-part documentary there, Picun Chronicles. In 2014, the Picun literary group was founded under the guidance of Zhang Huiyu, a literature PhD from Peking University, who taught two-hour weekend literature classes for workers and drew commissions from outlets such as NetEase's "Renjian" column and Jiemian's "Noon Stories." In 2015, two scholars from Tsinghua University's China Rural Studies Institute, Wang Haixia and Meng Qingguo, published a paper in Urban Development Studies using the Migrant Workers' Home as a case study in "how social organizations can take part in urban-village community governance." In 2016, director Qin Xiaoyu came back to film The Verse of Us 《我的诗篇》, a documentary about worker-poets.

That reputation can outrun the people it serves. Beijing's migrant workers number in the millions, and some of those living in Picun had never even heard of these organizations.

The New Workers' Theater at the Migrant Workers' Home, photo sourced online

About the time Zhang Shuli was landing at Capital International Airport, the notice setting the 6 p.m. deadline was already spreading across social media. Sun Heng heard the news in Yichun, Jiangxi, and made it back by 6 p.m. as well. Sun Heng heads the Migrant Workers' Home; he had been in the middle of a "Land Folk Concert" tour. Starting at 2 p.m., reporters from Caixin, Phoenix Online, China Youth Daily, Meiri Renwu, Jiemian, GQ, PingWest, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Singapore's Lianhe Ribao all converged on the scene.

Beijing's "major safety-hazard investigation, cleanup, and rectification" campaign was drawing more and more attention. The day before, the Beijing Municipal Safety Commission had held a press conference to address public concerns. By 10 p.m. that night, reports were appearing that tenants caught in the clearance in Tongzhou's Taihu Township had been told they could stay until year's end. On the 27th, news also circulated that Beijing Party Secretary Cai Qi had visited Xihongmen Township several times and stressed the need for "humane care."

But next to these faint signs of policy softening, the Picun notice — no sender, no official seal — was plainly more blunt.

A resident shows us the notice they received

At 3:30 p.m., two men who ran moving companies stood outside Jiaguan Apartments, directly across from the village committee, smoking anxiously. Since the November 19 fire, business had boomed for them — but they hadn't expected that at 9 a.m. on the 27th a clearance notice would be pasted on their own front door. Days of shuttling between Magezhuang in already-cleared Jinzhan Township and Changping's four northern villages, still mid-clearance, had given them a sharper sense than most residents of how hard housing was to find, and they were thinking about going home to Tai'an, Shandong.

Wang Lihua, from Hubei, lived next door with her daughter and son-in-law. She worked as a saleswoman at a Jingkelong supermarket in Wangjing, earning 3,000 yuan a month, six days a week, in a 20-square-meter unit that cost 500 yuan a month. She happened to have the day off and had planned to sleep in, but the commotion woke her at 9 a.m. and she saw the notice. "I have no idea where to find a place. I heard rents in the village have jumped from 700 to 1,500 in just a few days, and everything's full." She stood blankly in the doorway, then looked almost enviously at the two movers. "You're lucky — you've got trucks. At least you can sleep in them." One of the men flicked his cigarette down and ground it out. "Come on — once your bags are packed, throw them in our truck and we'll all head out together."

Zhang Degang, 32, had also decided to go home. He ran a building-materials business near Picun, had lived in the apartment for nearly three years, and had a 9-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son; his daughter attended a private elementary school in the village called Xinli. That morning, heavy pounding on the door woke him, and the notice outside came as no surprise. The day before, he had saved a WeChat article about the evictions, and it was deleted within hours. "They're clearing everywhere. Dongbanbi Village next door just got cleared. No surprise they'd reach Picun too."

Finding somewhere big enough for a family of four, close to his shop, and cheap would be nearly impossible — and his daughter's private school stood on non-residential land, the main target of the clearance. So Zhang Degang decided to just buy tickets back to his hometown in Sichuan. But "my daughter didn't really want to go. It took me a long time to talk her into it — she didn't want to leave the classmates she knew." As he spoke, his 9-year-old daughter ducked behind him, embarrassed — a navy puffer jacket over her school uniform, a small pink backpack on her shoulders.

In another alley beside Jiaguan Apartments, boss Yin's factory compound was being cleared too. He had been here more than a decade, subletting warehouse space to thirty or forty companies at 0.60 yuan per square meter, the units averaging 300 to 400 square meters. "Plenty of Beijing people like renting from me — it's cheap," he said. As he spoke, a Beijing businessman pulled up to the gate, rolled down his window, and asked, "We really have to move? By 6 p.m.?" Boss Yin, still smoking, replied, "Don't worry — I talked to the village chief. He gave me until December 1." The Beijing man drove into the warehouse. Boss Yin tilted his head. "These business owners — I feel sorriest for them. They have to find new premises, and they lose tens of thousands in one shot."

Around 4:30 p.m., outside Youth Apartments, an old man knelt before a foreign reporter, begging him to cover the story. Bystanders mocked him for kowtowing to foreigners; he shot back, "Reporters here can't cover this." The alley where the building stood held five or six adjoining apartment blocks — also without power since the 19th — affecting at least 1,000 households. One woman migrant worker said she could not find anywhere to stay and planned to hide her electric scooter in her room that night. "Maybe the guards will think everyone's already gone."

In fact, by 6 p.m., more than 80 percent of the residents in many buildings had already left.

Boss Yin's warehouse, around 4:30 p.m., just after the notices were torn down

A main street called "Picun Central Street" splits the village in two. South of the commercial strip lies industrial land — the part the notice ordered cleared by the night of the 27th. North of it are the village's original residential plots, where local villagers either became landlords themselves or leased their land to others to run as rental housing — that section was, for now, safe.

That afternoon, a 25-year-old man from Zhumadian, Henan, had just signed a lease at a building on the north side called "Shengteng Apartments No. 2." Compared with the past few months, he counted himself lucky — he had finally found a place to live. He had been in Beijing more than a decade, working as a printer at a shop in Xihongmen. Last year the shop relocated to Tuanhe because of demolition; this year it moved again, to Tianjin, over environmental rules; then it ran out of cash and folded, and he went home. Finding no decent work there, he came back to Beijing a month ago, teamed up with a friend to start a renovation company, and moved into Magezhuang in Jinzhan Township — only for Magezhuang to be sealed and cleared a few days later. It took him several days to track down this place in Picun. At least the village and his landlord both told him apartments on residential land would not be cleared.

But who could say. Since the 19th — the day after the fire — the fallout had reached Picun fast, even though Xinjiancun, where the fire broke out, was nearly 50 kilometers away. A small single room had gone from 700 to 1,600 yuan; he had haggled the landlord down to 1,200, but the lease ran only three months. And no one could say for sure whether the residential plots would be cleared too. In Daxing District, which moved first on shantytown redevelopment, the pattern had been to clear the non-residential land, then the residential plots, then reclaim all of it.

Picun Central Street, where people seemed unaware anything was wrong

The apartments near Central Street, built on residential land, went untouched; rental signs and notices were everywhere

Zhang Shuli, living in the southern part, had far worse luck. He had been renting in Songzhuang, and after hearing about clearances there a month ago he moved to Picun, thinking he could now leave for a project in Hohhot without worry. His wife's call came midway through the trip, and his thoughts turned back to his eight-month-old.

The landlord of his Jiaguan Apartments, a Henan man, fared no better. In 2012 he leased land from the village committee and put up the building, but it did not open to tenants until 2014. There had been a clearance the previous winter, too — all 200-some tenants on the second and third floors had to move out, leaving only the first floor to rent. When the notice came at 9 a.m. that day, nearly half the tenants had moved out by 3 p.m. Now he faced returning tens of thousands of yuan in prepaid rent and felt he "can't even get my costs back." He joked darkly, "Once everyone's gone, I might as well go too."

Maybe the reporters' arrival had an effect, or maybe the village had learned of the new "humane care" directive — at 4:30 p.m. the harshly worded notices came down, and the guards in black uniforms each carried a thick wad of crumpled white paper. Boss Yin from the industrial compound greeted them cheerfully — "Hey, fellas" — and watched the notices come off, unsure whether the village chief's spoken promise of "December 1" still held.

Around 6 p.m. a new notice went up. The deadline had become December 1. The language shifted from "anyone who has not evacuated, vacated, or cleared out will be deemed to have abandoned all belongings" to "our village committee will organize the relevant departments to carry out a forced removal in accordance with the law and will begin sealing doors and windows." A sender was added at the bottom: "Picun Village Committee." Still no official seal.

But most people in the apartments were already gone. A building-materials dealer from Shandong leaned against the entrance to Picun 737 Apartments, his things nearly packed, and said he was one of the few residents left and hadn't heard the deadline had been extended. A fellow tenant facing him said, "Even without an official seal — when a notice says something that terrifying, who dares stay?"

Judging by the photos of the Jinzhan Township notice circulating on social media, the original township deadline was December 1. The village's own notice — maybe on its own initiative, maybe to get a head start — had moved it up to the 27th.

Picun's new notice — the deadline moved from 6 p.m. that evening to December 1; this time a sender was included, but still no official seal

The notice issued by Jinzhan Township on November 24, setting a December 1 clearance deadline, with four official seals

At 6 p.m., Sun Heng finally got back. Reporters and documentary directors he knew wanted to hear what was happening, so a makeshift press conference was held in one of the Migrant Workers' Home offices, where he ran through what the organization's staff had learned that day about the evictions across the various complexes and what help the Home could offer.

As at their usual literary-group gatherings, everyone present introduced themselves in turn. Qin Xiaoyu's team was shooting the latest installment of The Verse of Us and set up a camera and lights on the spot, extending a long boom mic toward each questioner. It gave the whole scene an oddly dramatic quality. A reporter who had been here many times explained that it wasn't theater — it was more like an "abnormal state" produced by the rush of attention the evictions had triggered.

Sun Heng explains the afternoon's events; reporters photograph, the documentary crew films and records sound

Both the Migrant Workers' Home and the Migrant Workers' Museum sit in the northern section — collective-use land that Sun Heng's team had leased from the village committee, not residential plots, and so, by the village's account, also possibly subject to clearance. Even the northern apartments on residential land — even if spared for now — were getting harder to run. Rules against parking electric scooters in the hallways, and against electric blankets, induction cooktops, and portable heaters, were making the rental business tougher by the day.

Ma Sheng, from Zhejiang, had reached Picun a month earlier. A few friends had told him apartment buildings in Beijing made good money, so he found a local contact and leased a three-story building near Central Street — but so far only half of its 20-odd units were occupied. Because of those two bans, many people were reluctant to take a long lease in a small place like his, even at 800 to 900 yuan. Switching to daily rentals hadn't helped much either. As we talked, three people came to ask; on hearing "80 yuan a day," they turned and left. Ma Sheng looked worried. "I paid 300,000 yuan to lease this for a year, plus 70,000 or 80,000 in transfer fees. I'm starting to think I won't get it back."

By 9:30 p.m. the temperature had dropped to minus 7 degrees Celsius. Picun had gone quiet for now. Reporters scattered through the pitch-dark village, took one last look at the apartments, then hailed rides one by one and left.

For Zhang Shuli, at least tonight, he and his wife and their eight-month-old would not be out on the street. He had 96 more hours.

(Zhang Shuli, Wang Lihua, Zhang Degang, and Ma Sheng are all pseudonyms.)