Four new homeless shelters opened in Beijing Friday when a new regulation on aiding urban homeless took effect - but only four people turned to them for help.

A shelter in the eastern Chaoyang District and another in western Haidian District each received one homeless person, while the shelter in northwestern Shijiangshan District held two persons on Friday. Nobody turned up to the shelter in the southwestern Fengtai District.

The Measures on Aid and Management for Urban Homeless and Beggars, the new regulation, was approved by the State Council in mid July this year.

Under the new regulation, those homeless people can receive help from the aid stations if they are unable to feed themselves, have no relatives or friends with whom they can seek refuge and if they receive no minimum living allowance.

"I didn't know there was a new regulation," said Di, a rural resident from central China's Henan province who is working in Beijing.

"People still have some misunderstandings about urban homeless shelters," said Cao Lansuo, head of the Chaoyang district shelter.

With the new regulation taking effect, the previous regulations on dealing with the homeless, issued by the State Council in 1982, were null and void as of Friday.

According to the former holding and deportation system for urban homeless and beggars, the homeless people would have to enter a holding and deportation station and leave the city for their hometown, usually in an outlying rural area elsewhere in the country.

"I would not turn to the government shelters if I lost my job and became homeless because I have heard unhappy things about those stations," said a college graduate surnamed Xu, who has just found a job at the Chaoyang shelter.

The shelters running under the new rules are, however, different from the former holding and deportation stations, acknowledged Zhang Changqing, a social worker at the Chaoyang shelter.

The homeless people will receive help at the shelters of their own will instead of being forced by officials, he added.

The Chaoyang shelter has worked hard to publicize itself and will send out social workers to find needy people and persuade them to seek help, said Cao.

On March 17, Sun Zhigang, a college graduate working in the city of Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong province, was detained at the Guangzhou Police Holding Center for having no ID on him. He later died in the detention.

Sun's case had drawn broad public attention to the country's decade-long holding and deportation system for urban homeless.

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