Life under authoritarianism is…different.

Especially in modern China, which has relocated huge masses of citizens as its made its breakneck transition to an urban society, as insta-cities are filled by fiat. Part of one Guizhou province village is currently being emptied, however, not primarily because of the hurried march from an agrarian economy but because the government wants the land to be a lookout point for ETs. The relatively remote location will be the new home of a ginormous radio telescope watching for alien crafts, the latest salvo in its potentially ambitious space program.

From Edward Wong’s well-written New York Times piece:

BEIJING — More than 9,000 Chinese villagers are leaving their homes to make way for aliens.

It is not a colonization plan from outer space. The Chinese government is relocating thousands of villagers to complete construction by September of the world’s biggest radio telescope, whose intended purpose is to detect signs of extraterrestrial life.

The telescope would be 500 meters, or 1,640 feet, in diameter, by far the largest of its kind in the world. It is called FAST, for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, and costs an estimated 1.2 billion renminbi, or $184 million.

The mass relocation was announced on Tuesday in a report by Xinhua, the state news agency. The report said officials were relocating 2,029 families, a total of 9,110 people, living within a three-mile radius of the telescope in the area of Pingtang and Luodian Counties in the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Officials plan to give each person the equivalent of $1,800 for housing compensation, the report said. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest provinces.•