2015-02-09

Beijing Hunts for Illegal Excavations

The Rat Tribe of Beijing
Every morning, a metamorphosis takes place below the ground of China’s capital. In a world without sun or fresh air, people roll out of bed in windowless rooms, empty bedpans into communal toilets, pay 50 cents for a five-minute shower, ascend concrete stairways to the outside world and transform themselves from residents of the city’s most despised housing to strivers, hungry for a piece of the Chinese dream.

These new Beijingers, who number about 1 million, are known as members of the “rat tribe,” or shuzu, because they make their homes underground in warrens of small, often-dank rooms that are cheaper than almost anything they can find above ground. Most of the units are technically illegal because the government has decreed that basements and former air-raid bunkers shouldn’t be rented out, but like many things in China, they occupy a gray area.
Not anymore.

iFeng: 北京用雷达探测私挖地下室 查出6米深地下室 (Beijing Using Radar To Detect Underground Homes)

Police are checking homes for underground housing using radar, going to houses that have recently completed renovations. The searches come after a resident caused a cave in during unauthorized excavations. If they find an illegal excavation, they are ordering it refilled.

Around the nation: residents' underground digging sparks Beijing night road collapse
A large hole appeared in the road next to a building in Deshengmen Inner Street, near Houhai Lake, at midnight on Saturday, Beijing Youth Daily reports. Workman tried twice – and failed both times – to fill in the 10-metre deep hole, measuring 15 metres by five metres, which kept appearing in the ground over the next 12 hours. Four houses nearby also suffered subsidence. Beijing’s vice-mayor Zhang Yankun told chinanews.com the problem was caused by residents carrying out underground excavations.

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