A protest against the treatment of China’s Uighurs outside the White House

Last week, when I returned to my parents’ apartment after a trip to the US, I noticed the door of the neighboring apartment, usually kept slightly open, was shut. The muffled chatter that normally drifted from behind the door had turned to silence. “The girls had to leave,” Dad explained. “The families upstairs and downstairs wrote a joint letter to complain about them.”

Half a year ago, three dozen young women moved into the building, which is in a posh neighbourhood in northwestern Beijing. Wearing red uniforms, their hair tied back in buns, they worked at a local 24-hour hot pot joint, and slept in bunk beds in the three-bedroom apartment next door. Occasionally I ran into them in the lift. We chatted about their work and about Beijing (“I’m getting used to the smog, but my skin always feels dry.”)

This amiable arrangement continued until a few weeks ago, when a man from downstairs knocked on my parents’ door, asking Dad to sign a letter of complaint. “They’ve been very loud,” he gestured at next door. “But they don’t even use mobile phones around here,” Dad said. “Anyway, we also suspect they brought cockroaches into the building,” the man went on. “Those waidiren are dirty.”

“Waidiren,” or “people from out of town,” is a common phrase in Beijing, where the 21m population includes eight million migrants from other provinces. They are separated from local residents by the hukou system, a household registration status that denies them full access to local health care services and their children free public schooling. The policy has attracted much criticism in recent years, generating momentum for reform in key cities. Less discussed, however, is the casual discrimination they encounter.

Vast and diverse as China is, mass migration is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was set off by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in the 1980s, and picked up speed in the 1990s, as coastal cities transformed into metropolises, tempting people across the country with career opportunities. Migrants from Sichuan, Hunan and Shandong swarmed into Beijing and Shanghai, turning the once-homogenous cities into melting pots of dialects and customs. This has not led to an outbreak of open-mindedness among locals, who readily fall back on stereotypes about outsiders. People from Henan, a province in…

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