Homelessness has become a problem in China’s cities

EVERY EVENING around nine o’clock, dozens of homeless people start to trickle into Sanlian Taofen, a 24-hour bookshop in Beijing. Early arrivals jostle for one of the comfy chairs. Latecomers have to sleep on the cold floor. Guan Zhong, a homeless man from the eastern province of Shandong, calls the shop his “Wednesday home”. On other days the unemployed 42-year-old sleeps on benches in round-the-clock cafes. Mr Guan says he frequently changes venues to avoid “abusing the generosity” of managers. The bookshop is his favourite, not least because it is warm and quiet at night. “Burger King outlets are the worst—they expel people like me,” he says.

Thirty years ago homeless people were a rare sight in China’s cities. Strict controls on internal migration made it difficult for rural residents to move to urban areas. Most city-dwellers lived in housing supplied by the government, for which they paid peppercorn rents. Since then much has changed. Migration controls have eased. Most urban housing has been privatised. Villages have been flattened to make way for growing cities. Street-sleepers are still less visible than they are in the centres of some rich-world cities. But they are far more common than before.