After two years of toil on an Olympics-linked electrical project, 50-year-old Dai Yi has been packed off to his country home, unable to witness first-hand the fruits of his work at the Beijing Games.
Dai is one of many laborers and others lacking Beijing residence papers who say they have been ordered out as the city’s pre-Games clean-up turns toward its millions of ragtag migrants.
“The authorities will not let us stay. It’s because of the Olympics,” said the diminutive laborer, his work-roughened hands dragging two beat-up suitcases through a crowd at Beijing’s main train station.
Headed home to poverty-stricken Anhui Province, Dai has lost the roughly 1,000 yuan (about US$145) in monthly earnings that was an important lifeline to his extended family of eight back home.
“I don’t have a job now so I won’t be able to make any money until I figure out what to do,” he said.
Dai and other migrants said they were instructed by authorities to leave Beijing this week as the city enters the homestretch for the Beijing Olympics, which begin on Aug. 8.
The last-minute makeover for the city of 17 million people has included a crackdown on its huge vice industry, a shutdown of work at construction sites, and measures to curb Beijing’s notoriously foul air.
The clean-up now also includes the rough-hewn migrants from China’s vast countryside whose hard work in often dangerous conditions and for low pay has helped fuel Beijing’s growth and build Olympic venues.
The number of migrants in the city topped 5 million at the end of last year, or nearly one in three people in the capital, the city government said at the time.
It was not clear how many such people would leave. An official with the Beijing government’s press office denied migrants were ordered out.
But several migrants said an exodus was under way.
“My feeling is that it is not fair,” Yuan Daxin said, 36, who was also at the train station on his way home.
Yuan, from the northwestern province of Gansu, labored at an office tower construction site until Sunday, when such work across the city was halted.
His employer told workers they were getting an “Olympic holiday.”
However, Yuan noted cheerily that his Beijing work helped his family back home buy its first television, which they will use to watch the Games.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS