BEIJING—As China’s school year kicks off, some longtime Beijing residents are being forced by restrictive residency rules to send their children to distant schools, with some unlucky few packing their bags for places as far south as Shenzhen City in Guangdong Province, more than 1,000 miles away.
In the past year, Beijing has evicted a legion of status-less migrant workers and relocated hundreds of factories to cut down on what it calls an “urban disease” of over-population. Its number of registered residents saw a rare, albeit small, decline last year to 21.7 million.
