Demolitions straining families in China
BEIJING -- The spot where Ye Guo Qiang tried to kill himself lies in the shadow of the Great Hall of the People, where the Communist Party meets to build China's future.
On Oct. 1, National Day, he jumped off a bridge in the historic Forbidden City, in front of hundreds of onlookers, to protest the forced demolition by city authorities of his family's home and restaurant in the capital's Xuan Wu district.
The demolition cleared the way to turn Ye's neighborhood of decaying dwellings into a shopping arcade and park, part of Beijing's face lift for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Such stories have become increasingly common across China among working-class families, according to citizens groups and lawyers helping families seek redress.
After the Communist Revolution of 1949, families like Ye's were granted small plots of redistributed property. Now their quaint ''siheyuan," or courtyard, houses built along narrow alleyways are coveted by builders and city governments eager to transform China's ancient cities into modern metropolises.
''One day, there was a notice telling us that we all had to leave within three months," said Ye's brother, Ye Guo Zhu. ''We protested, but they began tearing down the houses."
The suicide attempt only worsened the family's predicament. Ye Guo Qiang survived the jump but received a two-year prison sentence for ''disturbing the social order."
Ye Guo Zhu also said that he and his son were briefly jailed and that local police roughed up the Ye brothers' 80-year-old father. They now live in a subway station, where they say police come to intimidate them into dropping their case.
Under the government's compensation guidelines, the family should have received either cash or a two- or three-bedroom apartment elsewhere in exchange for its home and restaurant. ''But corrupt officials swallowed up our apartments, and we got nothing," Zhu said.
Gao Zhi Sheng, a public interest lawyer who has taken the Ye family's case pro bono, blames corrupt city officials working in cahoots with developers for twisting property laws and demolition procedures to serve their purposes.
''All a developer has to do is point out an area he wants cleared to a local government," he said. ''The government notifies the people living there that they have to settle on a price with the developer by a certain date; then the area is demolished."
Liu Zhifeng, deputy minister of public works in the central government, said fraudulent demolitions are among the most frequently reported crimes. According to government figures, more than 160,000 cases of fraudulent land grabs were reported last year, more than twice the number in 2002.
In response, the National People's Congress amended the constitution in March to increase citizens' property rights. But the amendment creates no new systems to monitor and enforce the rules, stating only that ''legally obtained private property shall not be violated."
Government planners and developers say a hard-nosed remaking of Chinese cities is a painful but unavoidable process for the country, which is coping with the burgeoning population and the expanding economy. To make room for this expansion, China desperately needs to upgrade the massive housing stock built between the 1920s and '50s, said Yang Shen, president of the China Real Estate Association.
But residents protest that the homes they are given are not comparable to those taken and that cash compensation often is insufficient to buy a new place, even in distant suburbs.
By law, residents do not have the right to decline an offer of purchase from either the government or a developer and must accept the compensation -- either a new dwelling or cash. If residents and developers cannot agree on terms, the district government can set them.
There also is a tradition of authorities using architecture to project their city's image. Critics of the demolitions say city governments competing with one another for foreign investment and stature think little of demolishing vast swatches of inexpensive public housing to make way for imposing urban landmarks such as Beijing's new opera house.
Wenzhou Hou, a political activist and journalist in Beijing, said public anger over property grabs represents one of the greatest threats to political stability in China. ''There is a growing anger in China that our revolution, which was supposed to take property from the rich and give it to the poor, is now taking property from the poor and giving it to the rich," he said.
The sense of dislocation and social upheaval from widespread demolitions is straining China's national psyche, said Jia Xiao Ming, a professor of social work and psychology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. The problem is particularly acute for older Chinese.
''This is now an unrecognizable city," Liu Nan, 79, said of her native Beijing. Although Nan is lucky to have been spared having her current home demolished, none of the areas she lived in as a child remains and all her friends and family have been forced to move away. ''Everything looks different, and even the names of streets are different."
Ye Guo Zhu said he knows dozens of people who have been driven to suicide by the demolitions, and he lays out newspaper clippings chronicling their stories in front of him.
''Is this progress?" he said as he stared at the papers. ''This rogue government is trying to make China look like a sleeping beauty. But inside it's really a dead body."
