China property rights: the shot heard round the world?
“Why are words important?”
Partway through Bernardo Bertolucci’s sumptuous epic The Last Emperor, the young Pu Yi is being tutored by the gentleman’s gentleman, who carefully explains to him, with orotund gravity and dentured stately cadence:
“Words are important.”
“Why are words important?”
“If you cannot say what you mean, your majesty,
You cannot mean what you say,
And a gentleman should always mean what he says.”
Reginald Johnston, author of Twilight in the Forbidden City
Words are proving important in today’s
For starters, a developer wishes to demolish her home:
CHONGQING, China, March 23 — For weeks the confrontation drew attention from people all across China, as a simple homeowner stared down the forces of large-scale redevelopment that are sweeping this country, blocking the preparation of a gigantic construction site by an act of sheer will.
A building sits on its own island of land in
As with Kelo, even before any judicial resolution, the plaintiff has taken her case out of the courtroom, and into the court of public opinion:
Chinese bloggers were the first to spread the news, of a house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped piece of land like Mont-Saint-Michel in northern
Surrounded by tidal flats
Striking too is that, as with so many issues, blogs (who have the ultimate OODA loop) broke and sustained the story, and in time the regular media gradually followed.
Newspapers dived in next, followed by national television. Then, in a way that is common in China whenever an event begins to take on hints of political overtones, the story virtually disappeared from the news media after the government, bloggers here said, decreed that the subject was suddenly out of bounds.
We can’t blog about it any more
In an old-media environment, a news embargo would kill the story. Not here, for it had escaped into media
Still, the “nail house,” as many here have called it because of the homeowner’s tenacity, like a nail that cannot be pulled out, remains the most popular current topic among bloggers in
Dang those property rights
What gave the story energy is exactly the same crystallized contrast that fueled the Kelo backlash: the rich and powerful coercing or bulldozing — literally! — the small and weak:
It has a universal resonance in a country where rich developers are seen to be in cahoots with politicians and where both enjoy unchallenged sway.
Each year, China is roiled by tens of thousands of riots and demonstrations, and few issues pack as much emotional force as the discontent of people who are suddenly uprooted, told that they must make way for a new skyscraper or golf course or industrial zone.
Judging from these dynamics,
One law for upstairs, another for downstairs
That sense of injustice, which has powered property-rights reforms from Magna Carta to the Fifth Amendment to Kelo, gives rise to a groundswell of rights-protection initiatives, starting with eminent domain.
But first, the matter had to last long enough to attract notice, and for this we acknowledge the force of one woman:
What drove interest in the
What Norman Oder and others call “changing facts on the ground.”
How did this owner, a woman no less, manage? Millions wondered.
Part of the answer, which on meeting her takes only a moment to discover, is that Wu Ping is anything but an ordinary woman. With her dramatic lock of hair precisely combed and pinned in the back, a form-flattering bright red coat, high cheekbones and wide, excited eyes, the tall, 49-year-old restaurant entrepreneur knows how to attract attention — a potent weapon in China’s new media age, in which people try to use public opinion and appeals to the national image to influence the authorities.
“Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! I’m being repressed!”
Too little do we in the policy arena appreciate the importance of a clear, cogent, anecdotal case — and of a passionate and articulate advocate:
“For over two years they haven’t allowed me access to my property,” said Ms. Wu, her arms flailing as she led a brisk walk through the Yangjiaping neighborhood here. It is an area in the throes of large-scale redevelopment, with broad avenues, big shopping malls and a recently built elevated monorail line, from whose platform nearly everyone stops to gawk at the nail house.
Within moments of her arrival at the locked gate of the excavated construction site, a crowd began to gather.
Defenders of eminent domain for economic development (ED4ED) — among whom I generally count myself one — tend to argue that when a redevelopment entity has created an overall plan, it is legitimate to use eminent domain to remove minority holdouts. My view does include the idea of an expanded and increased definition of ‘just compensation,’ which acts as a check on unbridling trampling of property rights … but that view is also predicated on sound due process, which even in the United States can be colored by municipal self-interest, and which here in Chongqing is evidently honored more in the breach than the observance:
The people, many of them workers with sunken cheeks, dressed in grimy clothes, regarded Ms. Wu with expressions of wonderment. Some of them exchanged stories about how they had been forced to relocate and soothed each other with comments about how it all could not be helped.
We’ve seen in Kelo that the threat of eminent domain lubricates settlement with holdouts; here we have at least second-hand evidence that the threat is more than judicial, it’s criminal:
“If it were an ordinary person they would have hired thugs and beat her up,” murmured a woman dressed in a green sweater who was drawn by the throng. “Ordinary people don’t dare fight with the developers. They’re too strong.”
Law is the bulwark against intimidation. Where is the law?
I fought the law and the law won
Earlier this month the National People’s Congress passed a historic law guaranteeing private property rights to
Wu Bangguo, chairman of the NPC
Laws guarantee rights only if they are enforced. So it may take time for rights written on paper to become engrained in common-law. In
“In the past they would have just knocked it down,” said an 80-year-old woman who said she used to be a neighbor of Ms. Wu’s. “Now that’s forbidden, because
Rule of law accretes.
“I have more faith than others,” Ms. Wu began. “I believe that this is my legal property, and if I cannot protect my own rights, it makes a mockery of the property law just passed. In a democratic and lawful society a person has the legal right to manage one’s own property.”
The autocracy passes laws to give itself cover, and like Gulliver with the Lilliputians finds itself enmeshed therein.
Why did I write those laws, anyway?
Tian Yihang, a local college student, spoke glowingly of her in an interview at the monorail station. “This is a peculiar situation,” he said, with a bit of understatement. “I admire the owner for being so persistent in her principles. In
Ms. Wu will in all likelihood lose her battle. Indeed, developers recently filed administrative motions to allow them to demolish her lonely building. Certainly the local authorities are eager to see the last of her.
It’s easy to forget that judicially, Suzette Kelo lost her fight. But politically, she (and her shrewd advocacy supporters) won, for the political winds have shifted. Here, those defending the policy find themselves being forced to use the language of law (”Words are important”), not of might:
“During the process of demolition, 280 households were all satisfied with their compensation and moved,” said Ren Zhongping, a city housing official. “Wu was the only one we had to dismantle forcibly.”
That’s not the way to say it, Mr. Ren. Like former emperor Pu Yi, you may be sent to external communications re-education
Pu Yi after his ten years in re-education
“She has the value of her house in her heart, but what she has in mind is not practical. It’s far beyond the standards of compensation decided by owners of housing and the professional appraisal organ.”
Ms. Wu and her brother know the value of performance art: withdraw so as to keep your skull unclubbed:
With the street so choked with onlookers that traffic began to back up, Ms. Wu’s brother, Wu Jian, began waving a newspaper above the crowd, pointing to pictures of Ms. Wu’s husband, a local martial arts champion, who was scheduled to appear in a highly publicized tournament that evening. “He’s going into our building and will plant a flag there,” Mr. Wu announced.
But win the video moment:
Moments later, as the crowd began to thin, a Chinese flag appeared on the roof with a hand-painted banner that read: “A citizen’s legal property is not to be encroached on.”
Images drive words, and words drive politics, and politics drives laws.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;
Already Ms. Wu’s example is being repeated elsewhere.
Words are important.
Those who passed the law may find they have hatched a dragon.
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard ’round the world.
[Update: Ms. Wu's home has been demolished.]
“I have not yet begun to fight!”
