Guangzhou's Chengzhongcun started out when the Chinese government requisitioned houses and farmland in the city in order to build an "urban" city and in return gave land and money to the owners of these houses. Thus the locals discovered the very financially rewarding situation they were in, so they began to build more stories and more houses, leasing to new migrants on the outskirts of the city with increasingly smaller rooms and minimal walking space in between, leading to residents calling them "houses that kiss each other", "houses that shake hands", while outsiders called them "tumours" and "pustules" for their unclean appearence.
While Beijing's Chengzhongcun have been renamed multiple times, Guangzhou's
Chengzhongcun have kept their original names; in addition gates seperate the villages with the average number of inhabitants around 50,000 with only 40% having residence permits to live there. While both the natives of a village and new migrants are "marginalized" by the Chinese governemnt, one makes up the "novue richie" as the landlords, and the other the ones who live in slums, leading to an imbalance of societally equal citizens.
Gransow, Bettina. "Slum Formation or Urban Innovation? – Migrant Communities and Social Change in Chinese Megacities." Freie Universität Berlin and Sun Yat-sen University Guangzhou, P.R. China. Print.
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