Artist flees Beijing after filming mass evictions

HONG KONG — When Hua Yong, a painter in Beijing, first witnessed the eviction of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from the Chinese capital last month, he worried no one would believe the scope of it.

After a deadly fire in November, Beijing officials introduced an aggressive campaign to tear down apartment buildings and evict migrants from poorer sections of the city. Some residents were given just hours to leave.

Mr. Hua feared China’s strictly controlled news media would not cover the evictions accurately, so he decided to document and publish online his own videos of the crackdown.

Starting in November, he posted to YouTube and WeChat dozens of videos he shot with his mobile phone and a selfie stick. Often, he filmed himself walking past the rubble of demolished buildings, or interviewing the laborers who were promised work and a better life in the capital only to have everything suddenly upended.

It felt like a disaster, he said.

The migrants, many of whom are poorly paid workers who flocked to Beijing from across rural China, have been called the “low-end population” in some government planning documents and the state news media. The authorities now deny any connection with the phrase, which has been taken up by supporters of the displaced.

Mr. Hua, 48, said that were it not for the money he earned from painting, he too would be a member of the “low-end population.” In his conversations with workers, some said they felt painfully unwelcome in Beijing.

Last week, Mr. Hua, like many of the people he has filmed, was forced to leave Beijing. He fled the city after the police came to arrest him for publicizing the evictions. He has relied on friends to move him “from city A to city B,” he said in a video posted Sunday

“Now they want to move me on to an even safer city C,” he added.

It was not his first run-in with the authorities. In 2012, Mr. Hua was sentenced to a labor camp for a performance in memory of the protesters killed during a 1989 pro-democracy demonstration. In Tiananmen Square he punched himself in the face until his nose started bleeding, then used his blood to write “64,” the way the June 4 crackdown is usually rendered in Chinese.

He has made his living as a painter, but now questions the value of such work.

“In an environment where you can’t speak the truth, creating art is utterly worthless,” he said in an interview before he left Beijing.

While not a journalist himself, Mr. Hua has an ability to get just about anyone to talk. His videos show him wandering through streets strewn with the rubble of demolished buildings, chatting effortlessly with security officers and hostel owners, who have seen their tenants and their livelihoods vanish.

One landlord told him how security officers raided her small apartment building, smashing down doors and terrifying the residents. The authorities had also turned off the heat to force them to leave.

In some ways, she said, it was worse than the wartime occupation by the Japanese.

In addition to the evacuations, Mr. Hua has documented the migrants’ response. He filmed a tense scene as some migrants protested outside government offices in one village. They demanded answers from local officials about how they would be compensated for their losses.

He filmed another protest last week in which a few dozen residents of a village in the Daxing district of Beijing blocked a major roadway. “We want heat! We want to eat!” they chanted.

Later that same day, officers tried to throw him out of a meeting hall while he filmed discussions between residents and the police. Residents later drove him out of the village.

That night, Mr. Hua said, the police came to arrest him in the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou. Friends helped him leave Beijing, and he ditched his mobile phone’s SIM card in an effort to avoid being tracked. He continues to post videos and messages online.

“I hope people living in free countries can pay attention to those in unfree countries, and I hope people in unfree countries can bravely stand up and fight for the rights and dignity of being human,” he wrote in a letter he posted on Twitter.

He added: “When there is an avalanche, no snowflake is without blame.”