Mrs. Chen, a 60 year old woman from a rural area near Yancheng (a city not far from Nanjing), is working as a maid for a Nanjing family since 4 months. Her everyday job is to take care of a mentally disabled woman who cannot take care of herself.

The family needs Mrs. Chen to cook and wash for the woman, which takes her nearly 6 hours per day. She is allowed a short leave every two months, so that she can go back to her hometown. For her job, she earns 1,800 RMB per month, a large part of which will be sent home.

She and her husband, who is a farmer, have three children. Her son, a teacher working in one of the best high schools in Yancheng, is the reason that she continues to work at her age. In order to buy an apartment for her newly wed son and his wife, she and her husband borrowed a large amount of money. They would have to endure the debt for years if living on the earnings of her husband’s farming work. Therefore, she has to go out to work so that they can pay off the debt as early as possible.

We meet a woman selling fruit, like mangoes and peaches, along the road. She does not want to be photographed. According to her, if the photos of her are uploaded to the web and found by the police, she may be easily recognized by them and cause trouble for her.

Every day at 7:00 a.m. she goes to a wholesale market to purchase fruit. After that she always goes to the same place on a street in the center of Nanjing to sell her fruit from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Then she will go home, as about that time the police will start to patrol in the area. Once she was found by the police peddling along the road and all her fruit was confiscated. She adds that the police do not accept any fees that would allow her to sell her fruit. The profit she makes in one day is around 50 RMB.

Other peddlers surround us soon, laughing at her shyness and trying to persuade her to be photographed. One middle-aged man complains to us: “See the people in that institute coming here in their BMW? They belong to the upper class of the society and they own whatever they want. However, people like her, who are among the lowest class, have nothing but a small business to support the family. The government can entitle the elites to expensive cars, cheap houses, and many other things, but allow no space for these people to make a living. Is it fair? ”

Mr. Chen (pictured below in the middle) comes from the Hubei province and works in the car wash company of his brother in the Xicheng district of Beijing. All cars are washed by hand. It takes between 2 and 3 minutes to wash a car with four people and the price is 25 RMB.

According to Mr. Chen, owners of luxury cars prefer the hand-wash service. The most luxurious car he ever washed was a Rolls-Royce.

This car wash employs 7 employees and they all come from the same village in Hubei province. They can make between 2,000 RMB and 2,500 RMB per month.

Mr. Qu is a taxi driver. We meet him in the Jiugong area. He wears a T-shirt with the text ‘It takes two to stupid’ and in small letters: ‘Frank’s voice dropped a bit. “When the weather was bad he would drive me to school. He had this old truck that he used in his fishing business.’

Mr. Qu bought the T-shirt for 39 RMB at a street stall nearby.

Pants: 110 RMB, bought from a wholesale mall.

Shoes: more than 50 RMB, bought in his hometown in the northeast of China.

The area near the new Jiugong subway station, in the southeast of Beijing, is bustling with building activity. Several new high-rise residential compounds are almost completed and elsewhere workers are preparing building grounds for more real-estate development. The area used to be farmland. We visit the remnants of, what once was, a farmers’ village.

The one and two story houses of the village have to make way for another development project. Two third of the village has already been demolished, but 40 families refuse to leave.

We talk with Mrs. Li Shulan, almost 79 years old, who has lived in the village for the past 54 years. Mrs. Li is a mother of four daughters and two sons, who still live with her and her husband. The project developer, she tells, offered her family two apartments as compensation, but according to her that was definitely not enough to house her family. Apart from that, the apartments offered where of very bad quality and they were destroyed after the case was exposed in the media.

All houses in the village should have been demolished by June 2011 according to the developer’s planning. However, 40 families decided to stay because they were not satisfied with the compensation.

Mrs. Li tells that in June last year the water and electricity has been cut off and the public toilet has been demolished. For water they now go to a neighbor across the street and instead of going to a toilet they use the open land around the village.

Because of the harsh conditions, Mrs. Li wants to move. “What else can I do?”, she says. How and when she can leave is not clear.

Mrs. Li was born in the Shandong province. 54 years ago she and her husband moved to Beijing to work as a farmer at the Nanjiang farm. At that time, there were so many farmers that the farm could not provide enough accommodation in the dormitories. Thus, they built their own house in the field and settled down.

Now she and her husband, who stays in the house because of health problems, are retired. Together they receive a pension of 4,000 RMB per month.

Mrs. Li tells that there are many old people living in this village and a lot of them got ill due to the sanitary conditions and the worries about the future demolition of their houses. A few of them passed away in the past year.

When we leave the village we meet some people who live in the neighborhood. They explain that many of the residents in the village have spent all their lives living here, they invested a lot of money in their houses and feel it is hard to leave all their memories behind. Next to that, the compensation fees are too low.

They tell about an old lady from the village. Every night so goes to her daughter’s house to sleep and early the next day she returns to her old house in the village.

We also hear a lot of muttering about the rich people who drive poor people, who lived their whole life in this place, out of the city. They express a resentment against the rich, and the preferential treatment of government officials, that we have come across a lot lately.

A little over 10 people from a small village in Sichuan province just arrived in Beijing to work on a construction site. They are waiting for a bus to take them to their dormitory. Around 3,000 people used to live in their hometown, but these days more than half of them work in big cities.

We talk with one the female workers. She tells that more and more female migrant workers go to cities for construction work. Just like her. “There is no way out if one stays in the village”, she says.

She has a 16 year old child studying arts in the high school of her hometown. She felt the child did not need too much care anymore and decided to work in the big city to earn money for the child’s tuition fee in college. Her parents take care of the child at home.

Several workers reply, when asked if they carry any personal belongings like photos of family members, that they only brought useful things like a quilt, clothes and some daily necessities.

We walk in XiCheng district at a place were a few years ago you could walk through old hutongs. The residents have all been relocated to suburbs and the place is now a construction site of mid- to high-end apartments for retired government officials.

Mr. Huang Genhua approaches us. He asks if we are journalists. “No, we are not”. He likes to tell us his story anyway; for this blog. Knowing that a published story with his photo could cause him problems, we ask him again and he insists that is what he wants.

In 2005, Huang Genhua worked as a foreman at a construction site in Hebei. At a given moment the boss refused to pay the workers. Mr. Huang then paid the workers himself, but the boss still owns him 5,000 RMB.

According to Mr. Huang, he started a legal action against his boss in a local court. However, the court ruled before the scheduled proceedings without hearing him. The court ruled that his boss only needs to pay him 1,000 RMB. Mr. Huang appealed and when to an intermediate court. The judge in that court confirmed the ruling of the local court and asked Mr. Huang to apologize to his boss. When he attempted to continue legal proceedings, the court terminated the case.

Up to now he never received the 1,000 RMB his former boss should have paid him according to the court ruling.

Mr. Huang felt the treatment by the court was unfair. He claims that his former boss settled the matter with the judge by treating the judge with a dinner.  It is for this reason, he said, that the judge ruled before the scheduled proceedings that never took place. Now he has come to Beijing to start legal proceedings against the court.

Mr. Huang tells us that he needs exposure in the media and repeatedly stresses that he has all the evidence needed to confirm of what he said.

Finally, Mr. Huang and two of his friends show us some bruises and scratches. Mr. Huang says they were beaten up three days ago because he did not let go of the case.

These photos are taken along the road near Chaoyang Park South Gate, Beijing. The posters are sponsored by Solana, a modern lifestyle shopping center. Solana distinguishes itself from other shopping centers with a (southern) European style architecture. Western retail chains like Zara have an outlet in the center and it locates many foreign restaurants like French, Italian, Greek, Swiss and Arabian.

The text on the posters translates as follows:

(Photo above left) The army and the people are united as one and build the Great Wall of Steel (the latter is a metaphor indicating how solid and strong the country is)

(Photo above right) The army and the people make concerted efforts to turn Chaoyang (district) into a wonderful place.

(Photo below left) Love the army, better treatment for the army families, and strengthen the national defense; Support the policies, love the citizens and let Chaoyang district flourish.

(Photo below right, poster on the left) The Party, the army and the people work together to construct a world-class city.

Mr. Gao Baolin works as a keeper at the railroad crossing in Bei Yaodi (on the north side of Jiu Xianqiao North Road; near east fifth ring road).

Mr. Gao used to work at construction sites until 8 years ago. Since then he has been working full time as a keeper at this railroad crossing. In total 12 crossing keepers work in shifts to operate the gates and to safeguard that the operation works according to safety procedures.

Every time a train arrives, Mr. Gao will play a recording saying “Incoming(/outgoing) train is arriving, please be careful”, stop the traffic and clear the tracks together with two of his co-workers.

On this track between 20 and 40 trains pass by in a day; both freight trains and passenger trains. When passing by, trains have an average speed of 50 – 60 km/hr. The time each train arrives is usually fixed, but they are a bit late these days.

The railroad crossing needs someone to be on duty 24 hours a day, thus there are three eight-hour shifts every day. Mr. Gao takes three different shifts in three days and then he will have a day of rest before the next three days of shifts start.  For his full-time job, 48 hours a week, he earns a little more than 1,000RMB, he says (we assume this is the minimum wage for Beijing: 1160 RMB/month). Other benefits include a basic insurance and some gifts with festivals.

According to Mr.Gao, being a crossing keeper is more relaxed than his job at a construction site, but it brings more responsibility. It’s a suitable job for older people like him.  Mr. Gao’s wife is retired and his 28-year-old son just got married.

I saw this poster on a public telephone booth in Gaobeidian, Beijing. It translates as follows:

Photo of the “6.28″ Shooting Criminal Suspect

Features of the suspect: male, around 40, 1.7 meters tall, medium build, dark skin, X-type legs, does not speak mandarin very well. He’s unsociable and eccentric, quiet, likes to be alone and hardly has any contact with others. He always gets up early in the morning.

Literally translated ”走路外八” means “walking outside the eight” and my guess is that it refers to X-type legs. I googled it for videos on the subject to understand what type of condition of the legs was meant; only to find that the first search results were all about this suspect.

Here is a Chinese news report, dated January 9th, on the case:  http://www.chinanews.com/shipin/2012/01-09/news50653.html. In summary the report is about a robbery with shooting that happened on the 6^th of January in Nanjing. The victim died because of a shot in the head. Two days later the police uploaded a video on Weibo (Chinese Twitter). The video shows the suspect running away with 200,000 RMB taken from the crime scene. In total, the report says, he stole 480,000 RMB in 7 robberies. He made 9 victims; 7 of them died and 2 were seriously injured. The Nanjing police is hunting for the suspect with all available resources.

More info via other Internet sources:
“6.28″ on the poster refers to a robbery with shooting in Changsha at June 28th, 2011. The man, Zeng Kaigui, is the suspect in this case. He is also suspected of robberies and shootings in Chongqing.
The police is offering a 300,000 RMB reward for anyone who can provide information that will lead to the arrest of the suspect.