Authorities in Beijing have started an extensive 40-day campaign to inspect and demolish cheap housing in the city’s outskirts and forcibly evict residents, mostly migrant workers communities. Eli Friedman, a professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell University and author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, says the evictions reveal the regime’s moral vacuum and cautions that if replicated in other cities, they could lead to a real humanitarian tragedy.
