Chinese Fight A New Kind Of Land War
Many Citizens Battling Tide of Development
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 14, 2003; Page A01
NANJING, China -- On Aug. 22, Weng Biao was preparing to
buy a lunch of steamed fish and pickled vegetables for his
wife when officials from the government Office of
Demolition showed up at his family's two-room shack in a
small field slated to become a shopping mall and ordered
him to come with them.
A 39-year-old part-time laborer with a bad leg, Weng limped
to the office 200 yards away. Minutes later, several other
officials barged into Weng's house, took a jerrycan of
gasoline and forced his wife, 11-year-old son and
74-year-old father outside. A bulldozer arrived and knocked
down the house even though local residents had been given
until Aug. 30 to leave the area, witnesses and Chinese
reporters said.
At the Office of Demolition, officials say that Weng,
despite his handicap, overpowered six men in the office,
poured the can of fuel on himself and sparked a fire,
killing himself and burning the six men. But Weng's
neighbors and family members say they suspect that
demolition officials sprinkled his body with fuel to
persuade him to stop demanding more compensation for his
condemned house. Somehow the fuel ignited.
Weng's story is the latest tragedy in a war being fought
across China pitting a juggernaut of development against
growing grass-roots resistance. At the center of the battle
is property, the very issue that put the Communist Party in
power 54 years ago with the promise of land for peasants.
The Communists soon confiscated the land for collective
farming but then redistributed it as communes collapsed.
Today, only the state owns the land, but peasants and city
residents have rights to own buildings and lease land.
These limited property rights have become a flash point at
which people are confronting authorities, as well as a
platform for unprecedented civic activism. Citizens groups
are accusing local governments and government-backed
developers of expropriating farmland to enrich themselves,
failing to offer a fair market price for buildings and
homes they condemn and routinely violating contracts on the
size and quality of new apartments.
The battle is being played out in cities and villages over
the building of new roads, shopping malls, office towers
and sprawling satellite towns. Local governments and
developers, working to remake the face of China, are being
opposed by a disorganized array of homeowners, villagers
and residents in newly minted condominiums seeking to
defend these rights.
High-Stakes Dispute
The stakes are enormous. China's real estate boom is one of
the world's biggest. Cranes punctuate the skylines of every
city. Urban areas are filled with construction crews
banging through the night. The Beijing city government, for
example, estimates that by the time China hosts the Summer
Olympics in 2008, investors will have dumped $200 billion
into the real estate sector in Beijing alone, according to
a Western banker who attended a meeting with government
officials. In the past three years, individuals and
companies have taken out mortgages on residential real
estate worth $1.4 trillion, according to the State
Statistical Bureau.
The political stakes are high as well. In the cities, a
generation of grass-roots leaders is emerging from newly
formed associations of middle-class apartment owners to
fight the often corrupt entanglements of developers and
local Communist Party functionaries. In recent elections in
the southern city of Shenzhen, 10 candidates running for
positions in the local People's Congress came from
apartment-owner associations. The Communist Party was so
threatened that it ensured that only one of them -- a loyal
Communist Party member -- won, according to sources in that
city's bureaucracy.
"We are at the beginning of a bloodless revolution," said
Wang Yanbin, 49, an executive at a South Korean-owned
computer company. As an owner of a $100,000 apartment at
the tony Atlantic Place complex in Beijing, he helped beat
back a plan by the developer to build more apartments
instead of the park, lake, tennis courts, swimming pools
and clubhouse that had been promised. "During the Tiananmen
Square protests, nobody had any property, so you couldn't
really talk about real interests. There were just ideals,"
he said. "Then there was no middle class. Now there is a
middle class, we have property, we have something to lose,
so we have something to fight for."
At a recent meeting of a committee preparing elections for
an owners' association at Atlantic Place, Wang jousted
verbally with local government officials who insisted that
they, too, should be included in the group even though none
of them were owners in the complex.
"You are supposed to be a referee. How can you want to be a
player at the same time?" Wang asked one official who was
not accustomed to being challenged. She replied that even
though China had just passed a national law allowing owners
associations, Beijing's regulations on the issue had yet to
be issued.
"I can't imagine that Beijing's rules would contradict the
national law, can you?" Wang asked, again tongue-tying the
bureaucrat.
In the countryside, meanwhile, villagers are banding
together to fight unauthorized expropriation of their land,
which is turned into roads, factories, villas for rich
Communist Party officials or other developments. From 1999
to 2002, about 300,000 acres were illegally seized from 1.5
million farmers, according to conservative estimates by the
Ministry of Land and Resources. Bloody protests over this
issue have erupted across China.
On Aug. 4, thousands of residents of a village outside the
city of Shantou in Guangdong province blocked a highway
connecting Shantou to Shenzhen, about 175 miles to the
southwest, after they failed to get compensation for their
land, which was being confiscated to build factories in
addition to the highway.
Punishment for organizers of such protests can be swift.
Only 18 days after the highway demonstration, two men
accused of organizing it were given jail terms of four and
five years, respectively. One village leader brought a
petition with the names of 5,500 villagers and their
thumbprints to Beijing, 1,300 miles away, in a vain attempt
to get central government officials interested in the case.
Widespread Corruption
Zheng Enchong, a lawyer who has helped people in the
burgeoning metropolis of Shanghai bring more than 500 cases
against developers, was tried last month on charges of
revealing state secrets in what other lawyers have said was
a move by the government to stop lawyers from taking such
cases. He has yet to be sentenced.
Zheng was arrested because he told his clients that
Shanghai's wealthiest man, Zhou Zhengyi, obtained a
360,000-square-foot swath of land in the city's center for
free by bribing senior party officials.
Ranked as one of China's richest men by Forbes, Zhou
apparently will receive a slap on the wrist for the deal.
He was arrested last week but charged with minor
violations, including falsifying reports on registered
capital and manipulating securities prices, according to
Chinese news reports.
Widespread corruption is the main factor fueling the real
estate war in China. Local government officials, factory
bosses and other Chinese in positions of power sell the
rights to use chunks of land to developers for a low price
plus a hefty kickback. They then collude with gangs to oust
villagers or urban residents of the area. The compensation
paid to those residents, if any, is often a fraction of
what the property is really worth. In Nanjing, about 150
miles northwest of Shanghai, Weng's family was offered
$10,000 for their house, not enough, his wife said, to make
a deposit on another residence.
When a development is built, corruption kicks in again.
Apartments in China are usually sold before they are
completed. Take the case of Beijing City Plaza, the city's
first apartment complex opened to foreign buyers. The
brochure advertises it as a "monumental emblem of modern
life."
Residents were promised a swimming pool, tennis courts,
imported kitchen and bathroom fixtures and hot-spring
waters pumped into their homes. They received none of those
amenities. When residents teamed up to try to form a
homeowners association, the developer shut off the
electricity and water. Li Wei, an executive at a Beijing
electronics company, bought an apartment in the complex in
1997. It was supposed to be 1,000 square feet. He and his
wife felt it was smaller. They asked the developer to
measure it. Then they asked to see the developer's
measuring stick.
"It was amazing," Li recalled. "They were using a ruler
that was 15 percent shorter than a normal ruler."
Protests, however, have forced some developers and the
government to begin to change.
On Sept. 1, the State Council, China's cabinet, issued new
regulations allowing the formation of apartment owners
associations.
In Nanjing, on Sept. 5, the city government ordered a halt
to most demolition work. This followed a decision in late
August to consider increasing the amount of compensation
granted to homeowners who live on land slated for
redevelopment.
But that, Zhou Jie said, did not save her husband, Weng
Biao. She wants an investigation.
"He has a disability and he hadn't even had lunch, so how
could he overpower six strong and normal men?" she asked,
in a phone interview from a Nanjing hotel where police have
placed her and her son under house arrest.
Why, she asked, was her husband left on the office floor
for 30 minutes before an ambulance was dispatched to help
him, an allegation also reported by the Chinese news media.
The other six people injured in the fire fled the building
and received medical attention almost immediately. Weng,
burned over 90 percent of his body, died on the morning of
Sept. 6.
Zhou said police told her she would receive no compensation
for Weng's death despite widespread suspicion that he did
not intentionally set himself on fire. Police also told
Zhou that they would force her to pay for her stay in a
hotel under house arrest by docking $1,500 from the $10,000
the city was planning to give her for demolishing her
family's house.
"So I told them I had to leave the hotel because I couldn't
afford it," she said. "But they wouldn't let me go. Today
my son asked me if we were in jail. I guess we are. But
it's a jail where you have to pay rent."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
