The 44 villages that make up Beijing’s rural Changping District will soon become walled and gated communities , part of the Chinese capital’s effort to fight crime by making itself less welcoming to migrant workers. Currently, migrants make up the overwhelming majority of residents in the villages— 275,000 out of a population of 335,000 .
Once the villages are enclosed, migrants will only be allowed to enter if they have obtained Beijing residence permits. In Daxing District, where the closed-village system went into place in this past spring, police have reported a 46 percent drop in emergency calls.
