Anne Zhang

    zhangy49@gmail.com

    HU DECHAO, a 40-year-old man from Sichuan Province, returned to Shenzhen Relief Management Station in early April to seek shelter, as he’d done hundreds of times before.

    The station is one of four aid centers in the city that offer shelter and food to homeless people. It also provides basic medical treatment and psychological counseling, along with assistance in finding aid-seekers’ families and sending them back home.

    Hu receives a basic living allowance from his hometown government and has sheltered at the station more than 400 times over the past four years. Station staff members have sent him back home several times, but he’s continued to return to Shenzhen and seek aid at the station.

    Hu is one of many people who are known as “healthy idlers” and repeatedly return to the station to get free shelter and food.

    “We recently have seen more young, healthy people seeking shelter, which poses a challenge to the station’s management and puts us in a dilemma,” Zhang Siquan, director of the station’s executive office, said during an open house last month.

    Thorny problems

    The relief station has two sections — one for women and children and one for men.

    Zhang Wenwei, director of the men’s section, said more than 80 percent of the aid center’s total guests are men between 18 and 45 years old who stay in his section. More than 30 such guests have sought shelter there more than 30 times in the past year.

    Station staff said most of the frequent returnees are villagers from central and western areas of the country, including Gansu, Henan, Hunan and Sichuan provinces.

    The station’s director, Fu Tianyue, said Pearl River Delta cities, especially Shenzhen, attract many people from underdeveloped regions who are seeking greater opportunities for money. But some of them are poorly educated and can only make a living in Shenzhen by begging or doing low-paid physical labor. Those people usually end up becoming frequent guests at the relief station, Fu said.

    During the station’s open house, some visitors expressed anger and confusion when they saw many healthy young men, seemingly capable of supporting themselves, sheltering there.

    Zhou Jing, a 32-year-old chef from Sichuan Province, was one such man. Zhou has sheltered at the station more than 100 times in the past three years. He said he was first sent there by police in 2010, when he had spent all of his savings and couldn’t find anywhere to live in Shenzhen. Since then, Zhou said, he has become dependent on the station’s help despite his potential ability to support himself.

    Zhou said it’s not hard for him to find a job in Shenzhen because he is good at making Sichuan cuisine. But he complains that the work is hard and the pay is too low.

    “Since I can have free food and a warm bed to sleep in at the relief station, why would I bother to do such hard work?” Zhou bluntly told Shenzhen Daily.

    Such statements make many members of the public wonder if the relief station is helping its able-bodied guests or just encouraging their laziness.

    The office director, Zhang, responded by saying answers to that question aren’t always clear.

    “It’s really hard to differentiate idlers from people who actually need help, because their situations are usually complicated,” Zhang said.

    Murky laws

    The current Chinese law regarding helping the homeless was first implemented in 2003 and was touted during that time as a breakthrough in the history of China’s welfare development. But almost 10 years of practice has revealed that the law is too broad and murky and has many loopholes, Fu said.

    According to the law, people who are not capable of getting accommodation, have no relatives or friends to ask for help, don’t receive basic living allowances and are currently living as vagrant beggars can be sheltered at aid centers.

    But aid centers usually have no power or resources to check whether a person is eligible for assistance, Fu said. He said his station offers shelter to almost everyone who comes to seek help, for humanitarian purposes.

    The law also says individuals can only be sheltered for up to 10 days at a time, except in unusual circumstances. But it doesn’t specify how many 10-day periods or how many cumulative days a person can be sheltered at aid centers.

    “These loopholes enable some people to take advantage of aid centers,” Fu said.

    The murky law sometimes can indirectly induce violent incidents. Yang Cong from Sichuan Province, for example, has sheltered at the Shenzhen station almost 30 times in the past six months and came to the station drunk one night in February. For the safety of other people, a security guard asked Yang to stay out of the station until he was sober. But the drunken man forcibly climbed over the gate and wounded a staff member by stabbing him with a broken beer bottle.

    Employees at the Shenzhen station were attacked 18 times by aid-seekers in 2012, according to station operators.

    Searching for solutions

    Different from social welfare organizations, aid centers offer only provisional help during a person’s most difficult time. Zhang, director of the men’s section in Shenzhen, said an amendment has been proposed to optimize the current law, address loopholes and save taxpayers’ money. But he worried that the new law might also prevent some genuinely needy people from receiving aid.

    “The ultimate goal should be helping those people regain the ability to support themselves,” Zhang said.

    Some people have suggested that the relief station open a crafts workshop and enable guests to earn food and shelter by working there. But the law prevents aid centers from forcing people to engage in labor.

    Zhang has tried to find job opportunities for healthy adult men in his section. A logistics company in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, recruited six people from Zhang’s section last year, but one of them returned to the station after stealing his co-workers’ mobile phones, which jeopardized the trust between the company and the center.

    Despite that incident, the company launched another recruitment effort at the station recently. Zhang asked the company not to disclose workers’ pasts to avoid discrimination. Zhang said he’s trying to find more companies that can offer jobs to guests at the station.

    Not everyone appreciates his efforts. Aid-seeker Li Shuai, for example, turned down a job offer from the logistics company, said its monthly salary of 2,000 yuan (US$323) was too low for arduous porter work and asked Zhang to recommend a better job.

    Li, a 26-year-old from Shanxi Province, came to Shenzhen about two months ago. He graduated from a vocational high school.

    When asked whether he would always depend on the Shenzhen station for accommodation, Li said he has no other choice until he finds an ideal job.