A Hastily Assembled Crowd of Well-Meaning People, and the Most They Have Is Enthusiasm

In truth, they are not the kind of people who have "nothing to give but enthusiasm."

"We've come to realize that as a nonprofit there's very little we can do. The people struggling to make it in Beijing aren't really facing a housing problem — they're facing questions about whether to stay and build a life in this city, where to work and live, where to send their kids to school… No single nonprofit or well-meaning individual can answer those questions in full. You can offer targeted help, but you can't fix the underlying problem." That's Li Qingzhi, director of Fuping School in Beijing — an institution founded in 2002 by economists Mao Yushi and Tang Min to provide domestic-service job training for women. "Fuping" means "making ordinary people prosperous."

After the Daxing fire on November 18, Beijing launched a 40-day "comprehensive safety inspection, clearance, and rectification" campaign. Large numbers of people living in housing that failed fire codes and other government regulations were affected, ordered to vacate within days.

The campaign quickly stirred heated debate online and drew in many well-meaning people. Individuals and organizations alike scrambled to gather and compile information about cleared areas from every channel, hoping to produce an up-to-date map of the evictions. But within three days, the map had filled so densely with circles that it covered the whole of Beijing.

The more areas affected, the faster the volunteers poured in. Over the past week, articles sharing aid information routinely racked up hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments from people eager to help, all in a very short time. A collaborative Shimo document titled "Volunteer Information Roundup for Beijing" became impossible to edit on the evening of November 27 — too many people were adding information at the top at once.

All of these articles and shared documents were meant to match aid providers with people in need, but building that bridge has proved harder than anyone imagined. "I'm wondering whether they — the people who need help — even know the information exists," said Chen Yikun, founder of Jing-Xiang Online, a civil society group modeled on a Beijing hometown association.

We began following the wave of public-interest workers and volunteers that emerged after November 24. What we found was no shortage of enthusiasm — but behind the enthusiasm, a stark and uncomfortable reality.

Most of the support is just spinning its wheels

"As soon as the news broke online, hordes of kind-hearted people offered free housing, hot drinks, jobs… None of it was any use. It's all people spinning their wheels." That's Shen Tong, one of the founders of the Douban Volunteer Group, set up on November 26 with one main goal: to stop the "heated" but useless sharing of WeChat Moments posts, and get volunteers to actually show up.

The group searched Baidu Index for dozens of keywords tied to the evictions, and found that only a handful scored high — terms like "Xinjiancun," "Picun," and "qingtu" (clearance). For the great majority of villages being demolished and emptied, search volumes barely moved before or after. "This tells you the aid information is just spinning around on social networks without touching the ground. No one is actually going out to those places," Shen Tong said.

Their reasoning: if any organization or individual had gone to these villages, they would at least have searched Baidu for the place name and the surrounding conditions. But the Baidu search-index map looked nothing like the actual eviction map. In other words, most people had only voiced their support in words — many hadn't even searched to find out where the people they wanted to help actually were.

So the shared problem is a shortage of people

Sharing or liking a post to show support might cost two seconds. People who could actually spend several hours on the ground, or provide round-the-clock support from the rear, you could count on one hand.

Of the core members of the Douban Volunteer Group, only two — Shen Tong among them — were freelancers; the other three all had full-time jobs. Two handled technology, one managed the database, one coordinated on the ground, and Shen Tong handled outside contacts. Even with these clearly defined roles, the sheer volume of work meant everyone was doing the work of several people over the past few days.

Since November 26, Shen Tong had been collecting volunteer information and liaising with more than a dozen nonprofits, nonstop. Her hair had grown visibly oily, coated with dandruff. "I'm exhausted," she said. "Every morning I open my eyes and I'm straight into it."

Every person who wanted to help had to pass through her screening. She then forwarded the relevant information to the data team. Over the past three days she had added more than 500 contacts on WeChat; 200 were ultimately placed in the Douban Volunteers group.

The nonprofits coordinating with Shen Tong all said their most urgent need was manpower, and hoped Douban could send some volunteers their way. Meanwhile, the people who wanted to volunteer didn't know where they could actually go to help — a thin but stubborn membrane always stood between the two sides.

For most people with full-time jobs, the only time they could pitch in was on weekends or in the odd free moment — but even then, they had no idea where to head, and could only fret. Yao Wei, a professor at Minzu University of China, found himself free yesterday and wanted to get involved — but didn't know where to start. "The whole thing is so disorganized. I wanted to come help but didn't know where to begin. The groups are scattered, with no central coordination."

The disorder has a deeper cause: they have no official standing

Shen Tong admitted the Douban Volunteer Group was very loosely run — but there was no other way. "We have to stay loose. We're not registered. If we made it formal, it would get sensitive very fast." She explained that nonprofits are required to have an official body as their supervisory unit.

For now, she and her fellow members watched the group chat around the clock for updates. When they spotted an area that needed help, all they could do was message each person on WeChat one by one and ask whether they had time to go.

She was careful not to cross certain lines. During our interview she was visibly guarded, anxious not to reveal which nonprofits she was in contact with. After all, in just a few days there was already a cautionary tale to point to.

The first to answer the relief effort was the Swan Rescue Team. Their official account article published on the 23rd — "The 'Clearance': Beyond Watching, What Can We Do?" — drew over 100,000 views and nearly 20,000 likes. They rapidly built the largest aid WeChat group of the entire eviction response, 218 members strong — but the day before yesterday the group stopped accepting any new members, and at 8 p.m. on the 29th they announced the formal dissolution of both the WeChat group and the Swan Rescue Team itself.

They gave no reason in their announcement. The day before, when we phoned the team's director, he sounded downcast and declined to be interviewed. He said he wanted to keep a low profile, and seemed genuinely troubled by the enormous attention Swan Rescue had attracted. "It's best not to mention Swan at all. We just want to quietly help."

The organizations we phoned — Beijing Facilitator and Warm Beijing among them — all declined interviews for various reasons.

Many people were willing to give money — but that road is essentially closed

Questions about how to donate turned up regularly in the comments under aid-information articles, and nonprofits fielded plenty of calls from people wanting to give. The reality, though, is that few organizations are legally cleared to "accept donations." Since the Law on the Management of Activities of Overseas NGOs in the Mainland of China took effect on January 1, 2017, for instance, international NGOs are barred from fundraising on the Chinese mainland, stripping the more than 7,000 NGOs the law covers in China of their relief capacity.

Many nonprofits first looked to crowdfunding platforms, hoping to "raise money" on behalf of individuals in need. But the practical problem was that the number of people displaced was simply too large. "If 500 struggling families all posted on crowdfunding sites, there wouldn't be enough volunteers to walk each household through the process," one volunteer we interviewed explained. And from a would-be donor's side, being faced with 500 families raised its own question: who should you give to?

Some nonprofits considered a workaround — advancing funds from personal accounts and crowdfunding afterward. But then who would front tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of yuan? And what justification would they use for the crowdfund that followed? These questions all ultimately went nowhere.

Without money, there's no way to mobilize resources — take the most cited need: moving help

Moving assistance is one of the most urgent needs for many of those affected. For people whose eviction deadline was November 22, volunteers had already missed the moment they were needed most. Every day that passed, more people slipped through the cracks.

Yet according to Shen Tong, not a single nonprofit currently specializes in, or even mainly offers, moving services. Most could only offer one or two vehicles from individuals willing to help — nowhere near enough to cover the masses who needed to relocate. Nonprofits had tried to negotiate cut-rate or, ideally, free service with moving companies, but none of those talks came to anything.

The biggest need remained, in effect, completely unmet.

A new question: where is a family supposed to move?

For Wang Lin, a renovations worker from Huanggang in Hubei, a normal day meant waking at 6 a.m. and reaching the job site by 8. He lived in Hanjiachuan village, outside Beijing's Fifth Ring Road — some twenty-odd kilometers from the city center, but, as he put it, "there's nowhere closer that fits my budget." Like Wang Lin, most migrant workers in Beijing live beyond the Fifth Ring. The location is the result of weighing many factors. But when an eviction notice arrived, the organizations offering housing weren't always in a workable spot — too far from the job, or too far from where the children went to school.

In practice, the nonprofits able to offer large-scale housing are mostly in remote areas, and their locations limit who they can serve. Fuping School in Huoxian Town, Tongzhou District can provide roughly 200 beds. "We're already outside the Sixth Ring Road, more than two hours from downtown," Li Qingzhi said. "So a lot of the time, once we send them our directions, we never hear back."

Since Hanjiachuan village began demolitions in August, a third of its residents have already left. Half of the construction workers there are from Xishui County in Huanggang; Wang Lin's fellow villagers have mostly gone home. Only two restaurants remain. But Wang Lin is still hesitating. "It's really hard to decide. If I go back, I'll lose the clients I've built up in Beijing over all these years and have to start from scratch. If I leave, I'll have two or three months with no income — and my parents are getting old."

The larger, more tangled problem: the wheels spin because aid providers and those who need help never overlap

"Our volunteers are Douban, Zhihu, and Weibo users — migrant workers don't use Douban. There's a gap between us. All our frantic sharing in those spaces is useless," Shen Tong said. She sees this as the root reason why hundreds of thousands of shares and views have produced only a handful of calls for help. Those in need and those offering help inhabit two different social worlds, and the internet, rather than bridging the gulf between them, only widens it.

On November 27, Chen Yikun published an article on Jing-Xiang Online's WeChat official account announcing that the platform would serve as a bridge to help Hunanese people in need. The next morning he received nearly 20 messages from people willing to offer housing and jobs — but only 2 from Hunanese people asking for help.

Jing-Xiang Online has more than 10,000 active members, a community already filtered through one layer of self-selection. Chen Yikun has worked in the internet industry for years, but he doubts whether the internet actually reaches the people who truly need it. "The people who most need help have an information gap — they simply don't know that help is on offer."

Of the nonprofits we interviewed, Fuping School received the most calls for help. Li Qingzhi puts this down to the school's practice of encouraging students to share relief information within their WeChat circles. These students work in the low-end service sector and can reach some of those in need — but their reach is limited too. Five days in, even a document read more than 200,000 times had generated only 20 phone calls — a penetration rate of just 0.01%.

The upshot: "too late" has become the routine bind for aid workers

Aid workers find themselves stuck in a reactive position, always rushing to the scene only after forced-eviction notices have already gone out. And that's the best case. Often they only learn of an eviction twelve hours after the fact, and by the time they arrive, the only thing waiting for them is: "You should have come earlier."

Volunteers aren't just a day or two late. Had the Daxing fire never happened, the quiet evictions already underway might never have drawn any attention at all. On November 29, Yao Wei went to Hanjiachuan village with two of his students hoping to help — and found on arrival that the demolitions had finished back in August.

Yao Wei drove his students on to Beian River village, not far from Hanjiachuan — and found it razed to the ground, green mesh sheeting draped over piles of rubble and broken brick. At 7 p.m., a single room still showed a faint light. A stooped man was about to close his door. When they asked when the demolitions here had happened, he replied: "It's been several years already."

"Famous" villages drew more attention, but also wasted resources

On November 26, when Shen Tong and more than 20 Douban volunteers reached Picun, they found that residents — without water or electricity for seven days — had already cleared out entirely. The parts of the village not yet demolished were already saturated with aid information. "Picun didn't actually need this help anymore," Shen Tong said. "Picun is a famous hub for migrant workers — it's the home of the Workers' Home." Besides the Workers' Home school, Picun also has Tongzhou Home, organizations that keep close ties with local residents and could therefore respond at once.

But precisely because Picun was a "famous village," it drew an outsized share of attention — and wasted a great deal of resources. Over the past several days it has kept drawing a steady stream of volunteers and journalists. When the Douban group arrived on the 26th, they found nearly 200 people milling around like headless flies.

Meanwhile, the other villages just a wall away from Picun drew no attention at all.

Solving the housing problem may be the easiest part — but it still can't solve the livelihood problem

Fuping School offers free housing, but with conditions: women between 18 and 50 willing to work in domestic service, elder care, or childcare. In other words, the school only takes women — and this restriction effectively shuts the door on many women with families. Many called to ask, said they'd talk it over with their families, and were never heard from again.

These women voiced their worries to Li Qingzhi: if the whole family moved to Huoxian Town in Tongzhou, would the children be able to go to school nearby? There is only one public kindergarten near Huoxian Town, and that has put many off. "I really can't guarantee the children's schooling. Even our own staff's children can't get into the public kindergarten here," Li Qingzhi said.

Many women needed free housing in the short term but weren't ready to change careers. One woman who called had been teaching Chinese to foreigners. "Her skills are very different from a basic domestic worker's. Coming here would mean switching careers entirely — but she may not want to, and probably doesn't plan to spend her whole life in Beijing doing domestic work," Li Qingzhi said.

These conversations left Li Qingzhi feeling powerless, and also made her realize that what she was dealing with was not a single housing problem but the livelihood of an entire family. The decisions these women made now would directly shape both partners' work and their children's future schooling — decisions that can't be made in the short term, and that Fuping School can't fix overnight.

When everyone in China is flocking to Beijing for the income and opportunity the city offers, "unless job opportunities in second- and third-tier cities gradually improve, this problem can never be solved… Who wants to leave their hometown and travel this far to work?" Li Qingzhi said.

Fuping School has followed up several times with women who called — but as of November 30, not a single one had moved in.

Moving somewhere new means risking the same problem all over again

Even if women eventually enter Fuping School for training, after graduating they may be placed in an employer's home or in dormitories provided by a company in the city. According to Li Qingzhi, because domestic workers need somewhere to live between jobs, many Beijing domestic-service companies provide shared dormitory housing — but these places will inevitably be flagged as "fire hazards" and face the same risk of being cleared out. If such inspections were carried out across the board, "the entire domestic service industry in Beijing would collapse — we'd be looking at 500,000 people in the city out of work and with nowhere to live," she said.

Fuping School's Tongzhou campus was inspected yesterday too. It passed for now, but needs to add some equipment. It came close to being unable to provide its own residents with a place to stay.

Emergency job openings, at least for now, haven't solved the problem

On the evening of November 24, an article titled "A Great Fire's Cold: Beijing's Restaurant Workers Warm You Up" piled up 420,000 views and 1,500 comments. More than 500 Beijing restaurant businesses left comments offering jobs and accommodation. Wang Jie, the article's author and founder of Guanjian Restaurant Circle — a platform set up last August to provide restaurant training for startups — described the attention the article drew as "a willow tree sprouting unexpectedly from a stray branch."

On the afternoon of the 25th, the comment section was forced closed. Wang Jie reckoned far more than 500 restaurants were willing to help. She then compiled the 500-plus restaurant messages from the comments and published a new article, which itself drew nearly 25,000 views. Wang Jie was happy with the result, but didn't know how many people had actually been helped. "This got everyone's attention — that's what I set out to do."

She compared her role to introducing two friends: "I can introduce you, but I can't control how you get married, have children, how you get along with the in-laws…" She thought this needed a bigger organization to see it through, and that she could only do what was within her power.

Six days after that article appeared, the matchmaking looks to have failed. We reached out to Yunhaiyao restaurant in Beijing's Xicheng District, the Beijing Tianyuan Chicken Restaurant Group, and Yipin Buyi Huizhou Cuisine in Fengtai District — all on the list. None had received a single call for help in the past several days. Yipin Buyi Huizhou Cuisine said it could no longer take anyone in, as housing its own employees had already overwhelmed it.

The frantic, directionless chaos goes on. The enthusiasm of the enthusiastic shows no sign of fading. Two communities that rarely cross paths each voice their own anxiety, separately.

When those eager to help wanted to mobilize greater resources for the displaced — whether volunteers, NGOs, or a hastily assembled crowd of well-meaning people — the most they had to offer was enthusiasm. The foundation that would let them actually accomplish something is society. But the problem is: right now, there is no society.

(At the interviewees' request, Li Qingzhi, Yao Wei, Chen Yikun, Wang Lin, and Shen Tong are pseudonyms.)

Cover image: Unsplash, NYT

Uncaptioned photos are by Yao Wei and the reporter.