Just about every city in the world is thinking up new ways of bringing people back into the city center from the suburbs, to revitalize depopulated districts, and to bring in the creativity and industry of new immigrants. But Beijing, host of the 2008 Olympics, is doing just the reverse. It has decided it has a population problem - 11.4 million people that legally are allowed to live in the metropolis, and with the illegal migrant workers, 15 million.

So what did the city government do? It called a 'town' meeting to see what its citizens had to say. Read the Xinhua article here. Predictably there was a group of 'know-nothings' (referring to xenophobes like the anti-immigrant 'Know Nothing' Party in the US in the 1850s) that simply wanted to tighten controls of illegal workers. But obviously the 4 million illegal workers do many menial tasks that regular Beijingers would not condescend to perform. Not a good plan.

But other plans were even stranger. One was to move all the old people out. The old people obviously didn't like that and suggested that all the young people get off their collective perfumed asses and join the "Go West" campaign to develop China's Western regions. Other ideas included - stop construction on residential apartments in the city, move the universities, move the railway stations, move out all the big employers like the big companies.

What a strange alternate universe Beijing must be in from the rest of the world...