A 23-year-old man from Shandong province who has been sleeping in a disused telephone booth at Beijing Railway Station for about a month. He sleeps most of the day, rising only to search for food. Like many other homeless people, he rejected an offer of help from a State-run social assistance center.

Root causes

The issues fueling homelessness in China are far too deep-rooted to be solved with a hot meal and a ticket home, according to experts, who say the widening wealth gap and general living conditions in the countryside are main culprits.

This problem exists all over the world "but the rich-poor polarization and the backward rural social security system" are major factors in China, said Hu Xingdou, an economist at Beijing Institute of Technology.

He Feng and her husband, both 55, hail from a rural area of Shangqiu, Henan province. At 11 pm on Dec 15, they had just finished another day of begging at Beijing Railway Station.

"My husband suffered a leg disability and lost four fingers on his right hand in a car accident," said He, who was laying with her husband covered by a thin, dirty quilt. There was a crutch next to them on the ground.

She explained that they came to the capital in 2007 because their farm was unable to grow enough food for the family, and that they had never received a subsidy from the government. Their son, she said, is 36 and works in Shanghai on construction sites.

"I know about the assistance centers but we have to be in the street because we live on begging," said He.

Less than five minutes after talking with China Daily, the couple packed up and took the escalator to the station's second floor. He's husband walked smoothly, carrying the crutch in a right hand that had all five fingers.

Beggars often pretend to be disabled, said Pang Yanshen, a 48-year-old worker at the Dongcheng center, who can recount stories of finding a "wheelchair-bound man running" and a "deaf women chatting freely with a friend".

According to Feng, who has run the Dongcheng shelter since it opened in 2003, most beggars actually come from a small number of villages.

He said that, during a conversation with an official with Minquan county's civil affairs bureau in Shangqiu (He Feng's home city), he discovered that many villagers took to begging after hearing at Spring Festival how much money their neighbors had made on the streets.

Wang Bing, a 52-year-old from Minquan county, begs most days under a flyover near the capital's bustling Sanlitun shopping area.

"If I'm lucky, I can get 50-yuan and even 100-yuan notes here, which is much higher than the income I'd make farming at home," he said. "I don't feel ashamed of begging here. Nobody knows me, except my fellow villagers who do the same thing."

Like many others, Wang also refused help from the assistance center workers - unless they were willing to provide him with a ticket to Shanghai. In his mind, the streets of big cities are paved with gold.

"The fact some people prefer to migrate and eat leftovers in the capital proves there is an excessive concentration of power and money here," said Zhou Xiaozheng, a sociologist at Renmin University of China. "We have a rich country now, but the people at the bottom of society are still living miserable lives."