Illegal structures in a Beijing hutong

       Entering Zhongshili First Alley from the south entrance, the makeshift rooms built outside the small vegetable shop at the mouth of the alley are right in front of you. The reporter saw at the scene that the alley entrance, originally more than four meters wide, had been encroached upon until less than two meters remained. Just five or six meters into the alley from the entrance, a row of rooms built of wooden boards on the east side extends out from the old houses. The narrower wooden rooms are only 0.5 meters wide, and the more spacious ones are less than two meters. Some wooden rooms store miscellaneous items, and some are rented out for people to live in. There are as many as 17 such wooden rooms in the alley, which is only just over 200 meters long in total. The west side of the alley is adjacent to Huiwen Middle School, and the space less than 0.3 meters wide between the school's protective fencing and the wall has also been put to use, with rabbits being raised there. People riding bicycles past this spot all have to stop and pass slowly, and a moment of carelessness easily leads to scraping against them.

       Enforcement officers said that during preliminary inspections they found that these privately built wooden rooms were all fairly rudimentary, mostly made of discarded boards, and that the rooms used for living had many problems such as illegally strung electrical wiring, posing considerable hazards to nearby residents and the school.