Chapter 10 3. Ant tribe is a child

Beijing is striding forward towards a "world city", and the "survival of the fittest" in the city will become more intense day by day.Facing the ever-increasing urban population, Beijing has adopted a strategy of "abandoning the soldiers to protect the handsome".And the "ant tribe" who is not high enough to be low enough has become this abandoned child. Although Beijing never admits this, just like demolishing and renovating the "urban village" where the ants are strongholds, it is a reform and a progress for Beijing. As for whether it means "disaster" for you, The city has no intention of pursuing too much, because Beijing does not need "weak people."

weak strong forgotten in the corner of the world It's not my fault Although it is buried, it will never be wasted I live in a cave busy every day don't care what others say Ants are small but have a big heart insist on being yourself I'm not afraid of the wind I'm not afraid of the wind raindrops wet my dream go ahead i go ahead Footprints make me not ignorant I face the wind I face the wind Although the road ahead is heavy I will prop up with tentacles the sky after the rain ——"The Song of the Ants" This original song is the "famous work" of the "Tangjialing Brothers" who are rapidly becoming popular - 31-year-old Li Liguo and 22-year-old Bai Wanlong.However, what made them popular was not the music itself, but the visit of three members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in the spring of 2010.

At that time, Li Liguo and Bai Wanlong were sitting on the bed singing "The Song of the Ant Tribe". He Yongzhi, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference who came to investigate the "Ant Tribe" issue, was introduced by a media reporter and cried when he heard it. Li Guo and Bai Wanlong felt overwhelmed.As soon as the song was over, the two of them cried too. Li Liguo, this 31-year-old man has always believed that even if he is fighting outside, it has nothing to do with him. He plunged into his music dream and stayed in Beijing for ten years, and what he has struggled for in these ten years is all he has in front of him: Insufficiency In a rented house with no windows of 5 square meters, a cabinet and a bed are all the belongings.On the "table" made of several bricks, three hard steamed buns were randomly placed, and dusty cigarette boxes, food bags, and waste paper were scattered on the ground at the door. The most valuable thing in the whole house was the guitar.

It's not that I didn't think about giving up, just like my relatives and friends around me repeatedly persuaded me, I left Beijing and went back to my hometown to "find a decent job and live a good life".However, the dream, this illusory thing, made them persist.Bai Wanlong can still remember that once when he and Li Liguo were singing in the underground passage of Xidan, a girl donated one yuan to them, and the money was written all over: "I just bought a train ticket to leave Beijing, and I only have this It's one yuan, you sing really well, I hope you can stick to your dreams."

And in Tangjialing, an "urban village" in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing, there are still a large number of "dream seekers" like Li Liguo and Bai Wanlong.This group is collectively referred to as the "ant clan" by the public because of a book written by Lian Si, a postdoctoral fellow at Peking University. The "Blue Book of Chinese Talents (2010)" defines "ant tribe" as "a group of low-income college graduates".At the same time, it pointed out that "the age of this group is mainly concentrated between 22-29 years old, and it is a 'post-80s' highly educated group mainly of college students who have graduated within 5 years."The “average monthly income of this group is 1,956 yuan, which is much lower than the average monthly salary of urban workers in Beijing (3,726 yuan) and also lower than the national urban per capita monthly income (2,435 yuan).”

Based on the above-mentioned low income level, “this group mainly lives in urban-rural junctions or urban villages where the per capita monthly rent is 377 yuan and the per capita living area is less than 10 square meters. However, the accommodation conditions in the "cluster village" are poor, and a self-sufficient, self-enclosed low-level derivative economic circle has been formed. Small restaurants, small hair salons, small workshops, small clinics, small Internet cafes, small adult goods stores and low-end entertainment are operated without a license. A large number of business stores such as shopping malls are concentrated and increasing in an orderly manner, and the living conditions are worrying."

In fact, facing the high-pressure life in Beijing, most of the "ants" have the idea of ​​going home, but they don't want to go home empty-handed and see the disappointed eyes of their family members.They have such things in common: they were born in rural areas, went to very average schools, lacked social connections, had little support from their families, but had high expectations. Most of the "ant clan" are sensible and sensible young people. They think that their families sell pots and irons for their own education. After graduation, they have to work hard with their own hands to support themselves. Declining parents.As a result, they dwell in simple rental houses in big cities, and go back and forth in the talent market or units with meager salaries.

The 160-yuan hut in Tangjialing is the cheapest place Li Liguo and Bai Wanlong can find in Beijing.It is precisely because of the very low rent compared to the central city that the concentration of floating population has become the most obvious external feature of Tangjialing.In Tangjialing, the number of foreigners greatly exceeds that of locals.The local registered population is less than 3,000, while the migrant population is more than 50,000.Many of the residents have had the experience of moving around many times, and many of them have just been relocated from recently demolished villages such as Beiwu and Dawangjing.

"Among the more than 9 million migrants in Beijing, about 1 million live in basements, 2-3 million choose group rental houses, and the rest live in such urban villages." Beijing Housing Association Housing Academic Committee Committee member Cai Jinshui said that the idle housing in Beijing has reached hundreds of millions of square meters, but so many people live in poor conditions. On June 1, 2010, in the northeast corner of Tangjialing Village, "A Letter to Friends Living in Tangjialing" was posted, titled "Out of Tangjialing, the World Is Broader", signed by "Village Committee of Tangjialing Village, Xibeiwang Township".The content is as follows:

Friends living in Tangjialing: Hello! Tangjialing is one of the 50 key villages in Beijing. The Municipal Party Committee and the Municipal Government attach great importance to it. The overall transformation of this area is an important decision of the Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government to promote the overall transformation of the urban-rural interface and accelerate the integrated development of the city.The Tangjialing evacuation and relocation work will officially start in June as planned. Maybe you have lived in Tangjialing for many years, and you have a hometown feeling for Tangjialing; maybe you have only lived in Tangjialing for half a year or two or three months, but the villagers will always thank you for your contribution to Tangjialing.As a guest living in Tangjialing, facing such an environment that is about to be transformed, please actively cooperate with the evacuation and transformation work, move out of Tangjialing as soon as possible, find your new residence as soon as possible, and start your new life as soon as possible.Walking out of Tangjialing, the world is wider.

We firmly believe that when you come to the capital to work hard, you are accumulating energy down-to-earth and making unremitting efforts to realize your ideals. The current life is just a process of your life.When the new Tangjialing is completed, we sincerely welcome you to return to Tangjialing... Tangjialing is about to be demolished, because the crowded buses, the rampant "black cars", the potholed roads, and all kinds of small houses built without permission constitute a serious gap with the image of Beijing, a metropolis. Social problems such as the breeding of poisonous drugs are also the key reasons why "villages in cities" are on the verge of extinction.Some experts even define "villages in cities" as "the 'chronic disease' that plagues the process of urbanization". Chen Liuqin, a professor at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, made the following summary of the "village in the city", a special phenomenon of "urban surrounding the countryside" in the process of urbanization: "In the process of urbanization, in order to expand the scale of the city, with the help of the urban-rural dual structure , low-cost expropriation of rural land on the outskirts of the city, and gradually surrounded some villages in the built-up area. These villages were still in the outskirts of the city at first, and then located in the urban-rural fringe. With the continuous expansion of the city, they finally transformed into 'villages in the city'... in From the perspective of the rural areas outside the urban area, it is undoubtedly a part of the city, just like a community in the city; from the perspective of urban residents, it is still a rural area, and it is still a special "hillies" settlement that is incompatible with the city. "Urban villages" have many phenomena that resemble both rural areas and cities, such as: people's lifestyle is similar to that of a city, but people's ideology is similar to that of a rural area; the pursuit of higher economic efficiency of land output is like a city, but land management without planning Still like rural etc.” For such a "hillies", demolition is a certainty. According to the "Beijing News" report: "In 2010, Beijing will start the transformation of 50 key municipal villages with dirty sanitation environment and chaotic social order, including Tangjialing Village in Haidian District and Xiajia Hutong Village in Fengtai District. Project, and complete the rectification within a time limit. At present, 33 city-level key villages with bad debts have passed the review. These 33 villages with bad debts include Yaojiayuan Village and Guanzhuang Village in Chaoyang District, Ludian Second Village and Ludian Third Village in Daxing District, Tangjialing Village, Zhenxing Village, Mentou Village in Haidian District, Xiajia Hutong Village and Xiju Village in Fengtai District.” On June 25, 2010, in Tangjialing, Beijing, a huge demolition machine stretched tens of meters of steel tongs, destroying a dilapidated house next to it, and several six or seven-story illegal houses next to it have been bulldozed .After the overall transformation is completed, the "apartment" buildings built by local villagers privately on the homestead will be demolished.They will replace the relocation houses according to the area of ​​the homestead, and concentrate on going upstairs.Part of the vacated land will be returned to greening, and part of it will be reserved for industrial use by the village collective.The larger number of "low-end population" who have essentially become the main body of local residents can only pack their bags and move to further villages.At the same time, Beijing also stated that it will pay more attention to the villages around the new city to "prevent the transfer of problems at the urban-rural interface to the new city." Just when Tangjialing was being demolished in a hurry, the once-famous "capsule apartment" located in Building 47, Wujian Building, Liulangzhuang, Haidian District, another shelter of the ant tribe, was also due to being lower than the population limit stipulated by the state. The rental area per capita was demolished on the morning of June 26. Three rooms of seven or eight square meters are divided into 8 narrow high-speed rail boxes. "The 1.0 regular version has 3 rooms, and the monthly rent is 250; the 2.0 upgraded version has 2 rooms, and the monthly rent is 350 yuan." This is the "capsule". .The capsule apartment started construction in early February 2010.Its designer is 78-year-old Huang Rixin, a senior engineer who has been engaged in the design of power plants for thermal power stations all his life. After seeing Japanese "capsule hotels" in newspapers in 2009, he germinated to build "capsule apartments" by himself. " thoughts.He said that the purpose of building such apartments is not to make money, but to find a solution to the problem of transitional housing for fresh graduates. When Mr. Huang's capsule apartment began to be rented out in March, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics stated that the sales price of housing in Beijing rose by 12.3% year-on-year, and was 1.6% higher than that in February.The average price of off-plan houses within the Fourth Ring Road exceeds 30,000 yuan/square meter.The heat of the real estate market has accelerated the fermentation of social anxiety, and the three "capsule apartments" immediately scratched the most sensitive nerves of society. In May 2010, the "Draft Amendment to Beijing Housing Leasing Management Regulations" stipulated on the issue of group renting: For those who rent a complete set of buildings, the per capita construction area shall not be less than 10 square meters, or the per capita usable area shall not be less than 7.5 square meters; For those who live in one-story houses, the per capita usable area shall not be less than 4 square meters.However, the per capita usable area of ​​the capsule apartment is only 2.2 square meters, which does not meet the requirements for the per capita usable area of ​​the group rental. The government seems to have thought about everything, except for the tens of thousands of "ants" who once used these places as "safe havens". After the "nests" are taken over, where should they go next? There are roughly two options: one is to "move", leave the settlement, and look for a high-quality and cheap settlement again, or endure the high rent and live in an urban apartment.Choosing the former will only make the "ants" move further and further away, making their lives more turbulent.And the latter choice has also come to naught due to the continuously rising housing rental prices (according to the statistics of the Lianjia Real Estate Market Research Department, the average price of the rental market in Beijing in June 2010 was 2947 yuan/month, compared with 2885 yuan/month in May. Up 2.1%, up 15.8% from RMB 2,545 per month in the same period last year. Among them, Daxing, Changping, and Shunyi have the largest increases in rental market prices, with an average month-on-month increase of about 10%); , packed up the package and left the city, but how big a blow will this be to the "ant tribe" with dreams? Although Beijing is preparing to build public rental housing on a large scale, especially to encourage village collectives and enterprises to build public rental housing on non-state-owned construction land, villagers and enterprises can participate in the construction of public rental housing through equity or investment.These "village office rental houses" are expected to be open to non-Beijing residents. However, you look carefully at these words: "ready", "hopeful".In other words, the beautiful nest of the ant clan is still in the blueprint stage, and after they are driven out of Tangjialing and other "villages in the city", where will they sleep tomorrow night?But it is a very real and urgent problem. "Procuratorial Daily" commented: "Whether it is 'moving' or 'divorce', it is cruel to the 'ants'. It is not easy to choose a dwelling, and demolition of the 'ant nest', for now, No matter how correct the starting point is, and no matter how bright the future is, promoting the rectification of urban villages will hardly be a disaster for the 'ants'." However, how can you expect the great Beijing to understand these trivial difficulties.In the not-too-distant future, you may be able to live in a clean public rental housing at a reasonable price.As for the current difficulties, please overcome them by yourself - this is Beijing, Beijing does not interfere with dreams, but dreams alone cannot survive in Beijing, you must learn to clench your teeth, clench and clench! "People's Forum" once conducted an online survey with Tencent.com, and more than 20,000 people participated in the questionnaire about "who is falling to the bottom". Among them, in terms of the recognition of the outstanding characteristics of the bottom-level group, "low income, no fixed place to live, worry about food and clothing to survive" (22.9%), "lack of various social security, it is difficult to obtain help from various organizations" (18.58 %), "There are grievances that are hard to sue, things are hard to deal with, and there are hardships that are hard to talk about" (18.29%), ranking the top three among the many options.In addition, the group of "college students who are not fully employed, such as the ant tribe" is considered to be the group most likely to become the new bottom class with a vote rate of 26.48%. 92.37% of the voters believe that the bottom-level public has a tendency to expand, and 63.81% of the people think that there is "almost no" opportunity for the bottom-level public to move upward. However, there are huge differences between the public's perception of the "ant clan" and experts and scholars.According to the latest research results in 2010 by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences "Research on the Changes of Contemporary Chinese Social Structure", "my country's middle class has reached 23% of the employed population, and 40% of the big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai are middle class. , the middle class is expanding at a rate of one percentage point per year."Lu Xueyi, professor of sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and editor-in-chief of the book "Contemporary Chinese Social Structure", even believes that "ant tribes are the reserve army of the middle class." This result naturally sparked a lot of controversy in the community.The focus of the debate is that the data is not consistent with the personal feelings of ordinary people, and some netizens even joked that they were "middle class". Wang Menglong, senior editor of China Business Review, said bluntly: There is no middle class in China.What he meant was, "China has always been a society with a 'missing middle class', and it is still the same today, even from an economic perspective, because the social security system is not perfect, so that middle-income earners face the possibility of falling into the lower class at any time ". This point of view was shared by a netizen named "One Dish", who said: "'Middle class' is a false proposition in China, because China only has one pole of wealth and one pole of poverty, they face each other directly, and there is no middle class in between." When it comes to the middle class, the United States has to be mentioned, because it is the most typical middle-class country in the world.As early as 1940, "Fortune" magazine conducted a survey in the United States, and 80% of the respondents believed that they belonged to the middle class.But Richard Longworth, author of "The Crisis of Global Economic Liberalization," also pointed out: "Those who claim to be middle class do not necessarily have considerable wealth...restaurant waiters, factory workers, business executives, stockbrokers, etc. Everyone is comfortable calling themselves middle class." But the "middle class" in the minds of Chinese people is definitely not "people with average income", "but an unattainable class, almost synonymous with "big money" and "rich". Although the National Bureau of Statistics of China Last year, the annual family income between 60,000 and 500,000 yuan was set as the standard for middle-class families, but there are still many Chinese, including those whose income is within this standard, do not agree with this standard.” Wei Cheng, a special contributor to the Chinese website of the British "Financial Times", said in the book "The So-called Middle Class": "If 85.5% of Chinese urban residents with a strong 'middle class' would completely throw the word 'middle class' to Isn't that a very dangerous thing if you kill a few rich people?" In fact, the loss of the "middle class" status of the vast middle class is largely due to the lack of "happiness" in urban life. In March 2010, Zhonghong Insurance officially released China’s first “White Paper on Happiness of Middle-Class Families” with middle-class families as research samples. According to the survey results, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Fujian, and Chongqing have the highest happiness index and the most developed economy. Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Shenzhen have the lowest happiness index, making them cities with "not enough happiness" in the hearts of middle-class families, or "pseudo-happiness". To a certain extent, the process of urbanization implies the meaning of "hiding wealth from the people", but in big cities, the embarrassing dilemma of "one house destroying a middle class" is becoming more and more obvious.Insufficient guarantees in housing, medical care, education, etc. have reduced the cultural consumption capacity of the middle class. Under such security pressure, happiness is naturally compromised. However, discussing the "happiness index" in general is far more important than solving the practical difficulties of survival.Tolstoy said long ago that happy families are generally alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.Moreover, in China's current environment, pressure is everywhere, and no one can escape. It's just that the difficulties and pressures are different.If our public authorities can understand the difficult situation of white-collar workers, blue-collar workers, gray-collar workers, and golden-collar workers from the above investigations, and adopt more humane policies and measures to solve some difficulties, such as "can't afford to live, Caesarean section costs more than five thousand yuan; I can’t afford education, and the cost of going to school is 30,000 yuan; I can’t afford housing, and it’s more than 10,000 yuan per square meter; I can’t afford illness, and the huge profits on medicine will scare you to death..." Provided on these "X can't afford" Only then can the value of the "White Paper on Happiness" be truly reflected. Zhang Zhenzhen, an assistant researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, believes that changes in urban population size are actually a part of urban social and economic development. The fact that some urban floating population control targets have repeatedly been set and repeatedly broken shows that the policy of "exclusion" of floating population needs to be implemented. Adjustments are made. Once the floating population becomes the urban marginal population, it will lead to an increase in the new urban poor population and form new contradictions in urbanization. Let's go back to Lu Xueyi's point of view. He said: "Nowadays people often talk about the 'ant clan'. I would say that those people are also middle class. Some people will definitely scold me, but those people are indeed the reserve army of the middle class. Their current situation It’s only temporary. There are still many people who think that they can’t afford a house or a car even after graduating with a master’s degree, so they say they are not middle-class. In fact, after graduating with a master’s or doctor’s degree abroad, it takes 20 to 30 years to earn a house. Can you afford a house right away? But most of the doctoral students I have graduated before 2004 already have a house and a car. Therefore, universities are the cradle for cultivating the middle class. Most undergraduate graduates later white collar'." Experts let the majority of "ants" to see hope.However, after accidentally becoming an "ant clan" in Beijing, where is our hope? The biggest problem for the ant tribe is the "snail dwelling". At present, public rental housing is under planning. In this city with a strict household registration system, it is still a big question mark whether "non-Beijing residents" can successfully live in it. It must also be impossible to be cheaper than "Tangjialing".However, can the living requirements of the "ants" be limited to a "public rental housing" that is out of reach? According to the data of "China Talent Development Report (2010)": "Comparing the living conditions of the 'ant clan' with their peers in all aspects, it is found that 71.29% of the 'ant clan' people think that their living conditions are not as good as those of their peers. 84% of them are dissatisfied with their jobs. The "ant tribe" has a strong sense of relative deprivation, and there is a huge psychological gap. They are significantly higher than Ordinary people, the mental state presents a sub-health level." Many people in the ant tribe often ask Pan Xiao's questions and sighs about "why the road of life is getting narrower and narrower".And are you sure you can find the answer in Beijing? Yang Tongnan found it, but that was after he left Beijing.When he packed his bags and left, the term "ant clan" was not yet popular; recalling those days now, he consciously labeled himself that. After graduating from university in 2006, he joined an insurance company as a salesperson; before leaving Beijing, he worked in this job for about a year and a half, until one day, he "felt he couldn't live anymore." Two things became the direct reasons for him to leave Beijing.One is because of the rent issue, he had a quarrel with the landlord, and the fight was very serious. "It was during that time that I called 110 for the first time in my life, and later went to court for the first time in my life to file a lawsuit."Another incident was a conflict between two superiors in the company, which affected the employees below. "I just wanted to rely on my ability to eat, but I didn't expect to get involved in the 'office war' in a daze."He still feels wronged now. Before the Spring Festival in January 2008, exhausted physically and mentally, he quit his job, packed up all his belongings and returned to his hometown Cixi, Zhejiang. Relying on her qualifications of graduating from a prestigious school, Yang Tongnan soon became a college student village official.Compared with the busy days in Beijing, the slow-paced life in the village made him feel much more relaxed: "It's enough to work three or four hours a day, and you don't have to worry about rent when you live at home." The monthly salary of a village official is only 2,000 yuan, "but the consumption level in small places is not high, and I can save more than half of the money." After "escaping" from Beijing, the most significant change in his life was that he got married soon. This is the story of Yang Tongnan.And how to continue your own story, please carefully consider.