IN 2016 a short novel by Hao Jingfang, a young Chinese writer, won a Hugo award, an international prize for science fiction. In her story, “Folding Beijing”, the population of the capital has been separated into three groups who not only live in different areas but are not even awake at the same times. The 5m members of First Space—the rulers—are allowed to work, eat and go outside between 6am one morning and 6am the next. The 25m middle-class occupants of Second Space are up and about from 6am on the second day to 10pm that same night. The downtrodden denizens of Third Space are awake only between 10pm and 6am on the third morning, when the rulers wake and start the cycle again. Drugs keep everyone asleep, except during their hours of wakefulness.

Ms Hao has just announced that her story of a divided capital is to be made into a film. But in the past two weeks, real life in Beijing has been telling it in tragic form. On the evening of November 18th a fire broke out at a warehouse-cum-apartment block in a shantytown in southern Beijing populated by migrants—poor workers from rural areas of China whom district officials sometimes call “low-end people”. Nineteen migrants died, including seven low-end children.

As in the fictional “Folding Beijing”, the real city government has a maximum target size for the capital’s population: 23m in 2020, only 1m more than in 2016. To achieve this, the authorities have been booting out vulnerable people: migrants from the countryside. Their places of work are being closed down. Substandard housing, the only sort they can afford, is being condemned as unsafe. Activists say 3m migrants have been evicted from Beijing and other big cities in the past five years.

Unsafe spaces

The day after the disaster Cai Qi, the Communist Party chief of Beijing municipality, announced a citywide fire-safety inspection. This quickly morphed into mass evictions, starting in the shantytown. The police went round nearby buildings that had been slated for demolition, handing out eviction notices and giving people a few hours to leave. Water and electricity supplies were cut off. State media were instructed to use official bulletins “without exception”. (Such reports have not dwelled on the misery of those evicted.) The line of the dispossessed snaked into the night, looking for somewhere to rest. “It looks like Beijing is not for people like us,” said one. Volunteers who provided shelters to protect the newly homeless from freezing temperatures were told to stop doing so.

Meanwhile, the wealthier population of Second Space was dealing with its own scandal. On November 22nd eight parents of toddlers at a costly kindergarten in Beijing filed a report to the local police saying they had found needle marks on their children. They claimed—albeit without corroboration—that the toddlers had been forced to swallow tablets without explanation and had been told to strip naked and endure “health checks” by “grandpa doctor” and “uncle doctor”.

Allegations of inexplicable cruelty have a familiar ring. In October security cameras at a nursery in Shanghai had caught staff force-feeding toddlers mustard and sterilisers. In May in Zhejiang province a teacher had jabbed a syringe of blue paint into the buttocks of children who were refusing to take a nap. As after the fire, censors went into overdrive to suppress news about the kindergarten in Beijing. “Do not report or comment on the matter,” they said, as they blocked mentions of the name of the Chinese firm that owns the nursery in Beijing, RYB Education, which is listed in New York. The company said it had suspended staff who were allegedly involved, and that it was investigating the matter. The city’s education commission promised that henceforth every kindergarten would be inspected regularly.

Hitherto in the capital, middle-class scandals and the travails of poverty have usually unfolded as if on different planets, like in “Folding Beijing”. Those concerned about posh schools or house prices rarely worried about the problems of migrants and vice versa. But in the story, the protagonist inadvertently brings the separate spaces together when he tries to earn enough money to send his adopted daughter to a school where she can learn to dance. Similarly, in real-life Beijing, a fierce online reaction has broken through the divisions that usually separate middle-class scandals from those affecting the poor.

Online commentators were quick to link the two. A pseudonymous article on WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, compared the scandals to the Second and Third Spaces of Ms Hao’s tale. It argued that “delusions” in the capital were being “folded away”. The article was promptly deleted.

Despite censorship, angry commentary still appeared. On WeChat, legal scholars doubted the legality of the migrant evictions. “When you need construction workers,” wrote a user of Weibo, a microblogging site, “you call them fellow workers. When you don’t have enough for them to do, you call them migrant workers. When you are through with them, you call them ‘low-end people’ and send them packing.”

Unusually, some of the criticism has been overtly political. More than 100 people, including public intellectuals, signed a petition saying the evictions were illegal, an abuse of human rights and “clearly the government’s responsibility”. With heavy irony, another commentator wrote that just one month after a five-yearly party congress in Beijing, the city government was providing a taste of the “splendid future” promised at the gathering.

At the congress Mr Xi argued that social inequality and the gap between rich and poor were the biggest problems facing China. In particular, party officials fear, younger migrants, born in cities to parents who themselves migrated in the 1980s, could prove a threat to social stability because they have had little or no education in their urban homes, no longer have connections to the countryside as their parents did and—for some of the men—will not be able to marry because of a skewed sex ratio. These are the people who are being evicted from Beijing. If the government’s main response to their problems is repression, one would be tempted to agree with the character in “Folding Beijing” who tells the protagonist: “The current government is too inefficient and ossified. I don’t see much hope for systematic reform.”