From The South China Morning Post, via A Glimpse of the World:
Secondary school teacher Wang Li, 35, lives with his wife in a 130sqft basement room in Beijing. Last December, he applied for low-cost housing, to which he was entitled due to his low salary and poor living conditions.
For 10 weeks, Mr Wang lived on the street next to the developer of a housing project in the hope of being first in the queue when homes went on sale. But he missed out because his number did not come up in the lottery that decided the lucky winners.It is 12 years since the government announced the idea of low-cost urban housing for those who could not afford to buy homes in a market that for 40 years had relied on cheap apartments from work-units, but that had since gone commercial.
