China said the number of people living in cities exceeded the rural population for the first time, a historic shift that experts said would put a strain on society and the environment. The change marks a turning point for China, which for centuries was a mainly agrarian nation but has witnessed a huge population shift to cities over the past three decades as people seek to benefit from rapid economic growth.

The Beijing municipal government increased the capital’s minimum wage by 8.6 percent on 1 January this year, and the Shenzhen government has announced it will increase its minimum wage to 1,500 yuan a month on 1 February, making it once again the highest minimum wage in China.

China has shut down 24 schools for the children of migrant workers in Beijing forcing more than 14,000 students to drop out, state media said, sparking anger among parents who say they face discrimination.

Around 30 private schools, set up to provide a basic education for the children of migrant workers in Beijing, have been ordered to close, leaving nearly 30,000 students with an uncertain future as the new school year begins, the Beijing News reported today.

A fire swept through an illegally constructed garment factory and dormitory in the southern outskirts of Beijing early Monday morning, killing 18 people and injuring 23 others.

The Beijing authorities will on 1 January increase the city’s minimum wage for a second time in six months. The monthly minimum wage will go up by 200 yuan to 1,160 yuan, making it the highest in the country. In total, the Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Department announced six new measures, all of which will go into effect on 1 January, to strengthen its social welfare safety net as price rises begin to hurt the city’s most vulnerable.

The Beijing Municipal Federation of Trade Unions will next year press for the unionization of the capital’s more than 30,000 hospital supply workers, and the establishment of collective contracts with labour supply companies. The union federation announced last week that Beijing’s largest hospital labour supply company, Huijiafeng, had signed a collective labour contract with the district trade union, stipulating that, in 2011, the minimum wage for company employees would be 1,300 yuan per month or 55 yuan per day

The vast majority of people in Beijing believe the gap between rich and poor has reached dangerously high levels, a new social survey by the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences has found. The 2010 Blue Book, published this week, pointed out that “hatred of the rich” is now increasingly common among the residents of the Chinese capital, with more than 70 percent of respondents saying the gap between rich and poor was now “unreasonable.” Moreover, the majority of respondents singled out “people profiting from illicit activities” as the main cause of the increasing wealth gap.

As an unprecedented wave of strikes rolled across China this month – shutting car plants and electronics component makers – the staff at the Gloria Plaza Hotel in Beijing decided they, too, had had enough.

For the past 10 months, construction worker Wang Jianquan has been travelling back and forth between his home in rural Gansu and Beijing in the hope of getting wages he says he is owed. "They owe me three months' pay," the 36-year-old migrant worker said. "But I'm afraid to go back to the construction site because when we went before, they beat us."