Beijing to evict unlicensed migrants for holiday

BEIJING, Sep 19 (Reuters) China's capital plans to rid itself of unregistered migrant workers for next month's week-long National Day holiday in a bid to keep the crime rate down, state media said today.

Tenants without permits must move out of rented homes, the Beijing News said, citing police.

''The money landlords get from the tenants will be taken away, and the landlords will also be fined up to five times the rent,'' the newspaper said.

The move was aimed at ensuring the safety of the city during the holiday, one of three ''Golden Week'' breaks along with Lunar New Year and May Labour Day which spur one of the world's biggest migrations of humanity.

Beijing is officially home to more than 15 million people but has an estimated 3 million unregistered residents.

''From 2005 to April 2006, Beijing's prosecutors have been to court to charge 32,433 defendants, and migrants have accounted for 67.2 percent of them,'' the newspaper quoted a city official as saying.

City police will start a three-day inspection of places where migrants gather and areas with high crime rates, it said.

In past years, some of the estimated 100 million farmers who have moved to booming cities to find work have been unable to go home because for the holidays they had not been paid in months. Xinhua has reported that 2.5 billion dollar owed to migrants in 2004 went unpaid.

A series of suicides and violent attacks committed by desperate unpaid migrants has drawn attention to their plight.

Migrant Chinese have to carry permits proving their right to live in cities. In 2003, a university student was beaten to death by police when he failed to provide his papers in the southern city of Guangdong.

REUTERS LL SSC1120