Covid, positive migrant worker in Beijing reveals ‘underworld’ – Corriere.it

WLn a case of positivity in Beijing opened a crack in the The “world below” is inhabited by migrant workers from major cities. To stop infection, through powerful traceability that supports ‘Zero tolerance’ by the Chinese government in the face of Covid-19And The authorities meticulously reconstructed two weeks of the movements of an infected asymptomatic worker. 40 years old, Yue works as a general laborer on the construction site, carrying on his shoulders bricks, sandbags and cement; Then she collected huge waste from streets and apartment blocks and transported it to landfills. in all, In the 14 days prior to positivity, they counted 31 individual positions, are all heavy and low-paid, scattered across five central, modern, and wealthy districts of Beijing.

For the device that defends the capital from the Corona virus It was a nightmare to trace the whole chain of potential contacts of a kind of urban nomad. Shock to the people, who moved, rediscovered what everyone knows but tried not to see China as the second economy on the planet: a large number of immigrant workers in recent decades has led to the prosperity of the People’s Republic of China, Often stay purely wages and without rights, in cities far from their original villages, where the families stayed. The case attracted 60 million views and comments on Weibo, Mandarin Twitter, in two days. Yue said he was a former Hunter from Shandong; He left to look for his son, who was a chef in the city and disappeared in 2020. He sends his savings back to his family: six people. Now thousands of Beijing residents promise to help him in the search.

Migrant worker Yue was working at night, to build new buildings and clean up Beijing, which is a front for the party-state, especially now that the Olympics are underway. He searched for offers with ads on WeChat: “They tell me how many hundreds of bags of cement to take to the construction site or how many junk bags to move. If the salary is acceptable, I will introduce myself.” It was acceptable for Yue Yue to get 1 yuan for a 50-kilogram bag; If you have to go up the stairs, one more yuan per floor with the weight on your back; At the end of the day, they generally earned 200-300 renminbi: between 30 and 40 euros. After the night shifts, Yue Zhong went to sleep in a 10-square-meter room on the outskirts at dawn.

Accommodation cost: CNY 700 per month. Five hours of sleep and by noon job searches resumed; Tonight I came out of the invisible “underworld” to go to the construction site or to the landfill. Among Yue’s movements, they are all tracked by apps listed in each Chinese’s mobile phonesIt didn’t look like trattoria or bars: he ate cheap street food. Yue Zhong was scheduled to return to Shandong for the Lunar New Year. The train is on January 18th. For this he made the stopper. The authorities are convinced they have stopped the outbreak. But they did not solve the plight of migrant workers, despite Xi Jinping’s promises of a new “common prosperity”.