Category Archives: Class + Socioeconomics

Class + Socioeconomics

China Feature | The Homeless

Leave a comment

The “McRefugees” of China

“If you don’t have money, you can barely sleep.”

China’s homeless have begun turning one of the most recognizable beacons of global American corporatism for a bit of shut-eye: McDonald’s. With more than a thousand of the restaurants in mainland China open 24 hours a day, it has become a haven for the homeless in a country that severely restricts shelter residency. The New York Times profiles a few of those who make the nightly trek to the golden arches.

Read more:
“China’s Homeless Find Shelter Under McDonald’s Golden Arches” (The New York Times)

Additional reading:
“1,400 homeless sleeping on Hong Kong’s streets, double government estimates” (South China Morning Post)
“Down and Out in China” (Radio Free Asia)

(Image Credit: Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times)

Class + Socioeconomics, Nationality + Migration, Race + Color + Ethnicity

France Feature | Working Class, Immigrants & Racial Minorities

Estates of Emergency

France’s notorious housing estates–akin to housing projects in the U.S.–have long existed as symbols of an unintegrated France. Though President François Hollande has pledged to address the long-standing segregation that divides Paris’s poor banlieues from its more affluent city center, rampant unemployment, limited educational opportunities, crime, and stigmatization continue largely unchecked. The Guardian reflects on conditions in Paris’s most notorious estates a decade after riots forced what one banlieue mayor has called “social and territorial apartheid” into the national consciousness.

Read more:
“‘Nothing’s changed’: 10 years after French riots, banlieues remain in crisis” (The Guardian)

(Image Credit: Ed Alcock/The Guardian)

Class + Socioeconomics, Nationality + Migration, Race + Color + Ethnicity

Sweden News | European Migrants

1 Comment
E.U. migrants in Sweden threatened by growing anti-immigrant sentiment
  • In addition to the more than 30,000 migrants of non-E.U. origin granted asylum in Sweden last year, the E.U.’s open migration policy has brought many Southern and Eastern Europeans to the country, including the highly vulnerable ethnic Roma.
  • Police estimate there are around 4,000 people begging on the street in Sweden, among whom at least 77 violent attacks have occurred in the last 18 months according to one charity group.
  • Many Roma live in tents outside major cities while saving money from begging and bottle-collecting, lacking access to adequate health care and basic living resources.

“The response has not been convincing from Sweden’s political leaders. … They have been hoping the problem will go away by itself — and it won’t.”

Read the full story at the New York Times.

(Image Credit: Moa Karlberg/The New York Times )