GUANGZHOU - The city's police said more special campaigns will be launched during the rest of the year to fight crimes involving rented houses where migrants live.

The moves are to ensure good social order in Guangzhou for the 16th Asian Games, which will open on Friday, and the Asian Para Games, which will run from Dec 12 to 19, a senior police officer from the city bureau of public security said on Wednesday.

The campaigns focus on burglary, theft, robberies, rape and prostitution that occur in the city's lodging houses, he said. Police will also increase patrols in the areas where a lot of robberies have been occurring.

The city is facing the increasing pressure that comes with a rapidly growing migrant population.

The latest statistics, revealed by Guangzhou Daily on Wednesday, showed that the city had a registered transient population of more than 7.1 million at the end of October, compared to its 7.95 million permanent residents.

There were only 2.77 million migrants in May 2004.

Most migrant workers have to rent and live in the city's 3.4 million registered lodging houses and apartments.

Efforts have been made in the past few months to fight crime. The crime rate involving lodging houses dropped by 28.8 percent in the first 10 months of this year, the police officer said.

"Police will continue to spare no efforts in cracking down on crime," he added.

Huang Shiding,a professor at Guangzhou Academy of Social Sciences, said relevant departments should pay special attention to the management of the city's transient people and lodging houses.

Local people welcomed the moves. Chen Tianhong, a white-collar worker, said the lodging houses were usually hotbeds of crime, and government departments should focus on managing them to reduce crime.

To enhance the management of the city's lodging houses and transient population, the Guangzhou Bureau of Land Resources and Housing Management has required all property intermediaries to report correct information about their lodging houses and tenants.

The bureau has 3.4 million lodging houses on file, and more than 6.71 million people are living in them.

By the end of last month, six property intermediaries, who failed to report correct data about their lodging houses and tenants, had been punished. The maximum fine was 10,000 yuan.

China Daily

(China Daily 11/11/2010 page4)