Residents shop at a market in a Xuanwu hutong. Daily life remains unchanged. Photo: CFP

By Huang Shaojie

Government offices in the four downtown districts are packing up for a major redrawing of Beijing's administrative map, while all other residents' lives remain unaffected, for now.

The State Council gave the green light on July 1 to Beijing's proposal to fuse its four districts - Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chongwen and Xuanwu - into two, erasing two culture-rich names and halving the number of related government organs.

The administrative branch of the Dongcheng government will stay put after it merges with Chongwen, while the legislature will move to the location of the old Chongwen government, the Beijing News reported Thursday. "The office staff are preoccupied with the move," Tie Lan, a Party Committee publicity department worker with the Chongwen government, told the Global Times.

The same pattern of removal is under way for the Xicheng- Xuanwu merger as well, according to the Beijing News.

Public housing, household registrations (hukou) and some other district-based policies will be unaffected by the mergers, the Beijing News reported.

"Government-subsidized housing will be distributed as planned prior to the mergers," reads the report. A low-income citizen from the old Chongwen district thus may not be entitled to the public housing resources of the wealthier Dongcheng, which generated 7.1 billion yuan ($1.04 billion) in government revenue in 2009, compared to 2.06 billion yuan ($304 million) for Chongwen.

Hukou will not be affected either, the Beijing News quoted a police statement, implying that a newborn in the former Xuanwu may still be registered as a Xuanwu resident.

Xu Jingyun, a municipal government media officer, declined to interpret the implications of the mergers.

Until the government makes a more explicit statement, the only people known to be affected by the district merger appear to be government workers.