In pursuit of home sweet home

National campaign

Li's family is just one of tens of millions who live in slums in China. People who were once miners, loggers or factory workers, live in houses built decades ago, when productivity outweighed workers' welfare.

As house prices in cities have risen, the workers have been left behind and cannot afford new homes. Many have lost their jobs at depleted mines and vanished forests or in factories from the planned economy period, bankrupted by modern market zeal.

Compared with Li, 72-year-old Zhou Yupu, who also retired from a coal mine in Zaozhuang city, was much more fortunate. Benefitting from the government's urban renewal scheme, he traded his old shack for a 78-square-meter apartment.

Of the total apartment area, he was allocated 46 square meters free of charge, offset by his old house, and all he had to pay was 68,000 yuan ($11,000). The amount was less than a quarter of the local market price.

"I still can't believe I can live in such a nice place for such a low price," he said.

The government started clearing the slums in 2008, and by 2012, over 20 million like Zhou had moved to new homes.

In Zaozhuang, listed as resource-exhausted in 2009, slum clearance came along just as the city authorities welcomed private real estate enterprises to construct new dwellings.

Li Houxing, head of the city's housing management bureau, said demolition of unsuitable housing was inevitable for a city to develop.

It not only improves living conditions, but helps the city plan systematically for infrastructure or commercial construction, he said.

The nationwide project has brought hope to 33-year-old Yang Lijun, one of the 120,000 residents in the squalid Beiliang community in the city of Baotou, in North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

His family of five was allocated a 50-square-meter apartment, much better than their 18-square-meter house with beds in the kitchen.

"Moving to the new apartment, I never felt happier, not even when I got married," he said.

As of last year, 30,000 of the community, including Yang, had been moved to new apartments, with the other 90,000 waiting to be resettled.

On June 26, an executive meeting of the State Council presided over by Premier Li Keqiang decided to accelerate renewal of run-down neighborhoods, planning to move 10 million households over the next five years. Nearly 60 million residents, a number equal to the whole population of the United Kingdom, will have moved out of urban despair and into newly built apartments from 2008 to 2017.