HONG KONG - With growing rural unrest over
land seizures prompting Chinese leaders to shift
their focus to building a "new socialist
countryside" in the recently announced five-year
plan, it is easy to forget that the state of
affairs in Chinese cities is hardly ideal.
Disgruntled urban homeowners are also fed
up - with random fees, inadequate services,
illegal structures, unscrupulous property
developers and indifferent local officials.
Increasingly, they are turning to protest - and
even violence - to demand their rights. Indeed,
perhaps it is time for Chinese leaders to consider
a "new socialist cityscape" in addition to their
much-ballyhooed rural strategy. Unlike with rural
protests - 87,000 incidents of which
were
officially recorded last year, a 6% increase over
2004 - no official tally is kept on urban unrest
sparked by property disputes, but examples abound.
At the core of the problem is the lack of
any viable property law in China, despite the
adoption of a constitutional amendment by the
National People's Congress (NPC)in 2004 protecting
private property rights. The vagueness in the
language of that amendment, however, spurred legal
scholars to draft legislation with more specific
guarantees for property owners, and that bill was
scheduled to be adopted earlier this month at the
NPC's annual plenum in Beijing.
But a
funny thing happened. The draft law became the
subject of an intense debate between reformers and
conservatives that spilled over into the normally
placid, rubber-stamp NPC and resulted in the bill
being shelved for at least another year.
Proponents say the bill would provide
long-overdue legal recognition of private property
rights and guarantee compensation when property is
expropriated - a frequent occurrence and flash
point for angry protests in Chinese cities, as
well as in rural areas. But a resurgent group of
Marxist conservatives argues that, by encouraging
privatization, the law would widen the gulf
between the rich and the poor and exacerbate
social unrest.
Drafters had been
fine-tuning the bill for eight years before a
prominent Marxist legal scholar at Peking
University, Gong Xiantian, blasted the proposed
law in an open letter posted on the Internet and
also mailed to Wu Bangguo, chairman of the NPC's
Standing Committee. Gong maintained that the bill
violated the country's socialist constitution
because it gave equal protection to private and
state-owned property. Socialist principles dictate
that the state's rights supercede those of the
individual, Gong wrote, and conservatives were
quick to jump on his bandwagon, effectively
killing any chance the legislation would be passed
this year.
The conservative attack
provided quite a contrast to a simple explanation
of its merits that appeared in the
government-controlled China Daily 18 months
ago. Comparing a homeowner's property to a glass
cup, the anonymous article said: "For example, you
can keep your cup on your desk, sell it or even
smash it, so long as you are the legal owner of
the cup. Everyone else has the obligation not to
hinder you from exercising these rights. However,
if someone smashes it, he or she will be liable to
pay the cup owner."
At that point, Gong's
letter had not been written, and no one knew that
conservatives would muster the influence to quash
the draft legislation. And, in the wake of their
success, China's property developers are free for
at least another year to continue dipping into a
bag of dirty tricks that, while lining their
pockets, have inspired demonstrations all over the
country.
A litany of complaints
The fact that farmland remains
collectively owned in China complicates peasants'
claims for compensation when their land is seized
for industrial purposes. In cities, however,
private ownership is recognized. Nevertheless,
without legal protection, such recognition has not
provided much help to homeowners - who, according
to Human Rights Watch, are routinely evicted
without legal recourse, especially in Beijing, as
the country prepares for the 2008 Olympics to be
hosted there.
But evictions are not the
only problem. Homeowners have voiced a litany of
complaints, and the response from local
governments and property management firms has
ranged from indifference to violent suppression of
their grievances.
Just ask Li Gang, a
member of a residents' committee in a development
called Huanan New City in the southern metropolis
of Guangzhou. Last month, three days after Li had
led hundreds of fellow residents and businessmen
in a protest against a property management
company's arbitrary decision to cancel a shuttle
bus that had previously served their estate, he
found himself in a hospital, fighting for his
life. Thugs had forced their way into his home and
beaten him so severely that his spleen was
ruptured. Emergency surgery removed his spleen and
saved his life, but the message for like-minded
homeowners was ominously clear.
Li's
neighbors reported seeing his attackers flee down
the stairs from his home within view of security
guards, but the guards claimed they saw nothing
suspicious. Coincidentally, a surveillance camera
that could have supplied valuable evidence had
been re-positioned to face a concrete pillar.
Police officers investigating the attack came up
empty handed, and initially there were no reports
about it in the mainland media, although
homeowners and businessmen in Huanan New City were
busy spreading the word, and the free press in
Hong Kong (and overseas blogs) jumped all over the
story.
This outside pressure may help to
account for the arrest last week by Guangzhou
police of eight people in connection with the
attack. Police say they are also searching for
three additional suspects.
Li Youcheng,
who lives in Beijing's Taiping Garden, suffered a
similar fate after he complained about the
inadequate water supply at his estate. After he
was badly beaten, the homeowners' committee that
he heads sued local authorities over their
inaction in response to residents' petitions for
help - one of a rash of such lawsuits going
nowhere in China these days.
With property
developers deep in cahoots with local governments
because of the enormous stream of revenue they
represent, residents' committees are fighting a
David-vs-Goliath battle. Most lawsuits filed
against management companies, which are chosen by
developers and cannot be dismissed by dissatisfied
residents, are thrown out by the courts because
residents' groups have no legal status.
And, since achieving this status from the
Civil Affairs Bureau is a virtual bureaucratic and
political mission impossible, the vicious circle
of unanswered grievances and escalating protests
continues, with no sign of letting up. In fact, by
all accounts, these demonstrations are on the rise
in what must be seen by the country's leaders as
yet another example of unwelcome grassroots
democracy at work in China.
Hong Kong
looks on Here in Hong Kong there is more than a
casual interest in property disputes across the
border. This city, since it was handed back to
China in 1997, has been a autonomous special
administrative region where private property
rights are guaranteed by the Basic Law.
That guarantee appeared particularly
precious last December when a Hong Kong woman
claimed she was beaten by security guards on nine
separate occasions at her apartment compound in
Shenzhen, a booming mainland city just across the
border, after she complained about the illegal
structures a property management company had
erected on her compound.
Following the
dismissal of her lawsuit, without comment, by a
Shenzhen court, media pressure compelled Hong
Kong's chief executive, Donald Tsang, to
intervene, and the case has been reopened.
Not all Hong Kong residents lured across
the border by cheap real-estate prices have been
so fortunate as to win assistance from the chief
executive. Things got so bad in Shenzhen last
October for hundreds of apartment owners from Hong
Kong that they took to the streets in protest
against management companies that they say
overcharged them for utilities and renovations,
build illegal structures on their compounds and
provide substandard services. In the end, the city
called in riot police to disperse the angry
residents.
With real-estate transactions
plunging in Hong Kong while the Shenzhen property
market steams along at 20% annual growth, however,
it is clear that Hong Kong residents continue to
be drawn to the mainland. When they can purchase a
large apartment in Shenzhen with a garden and a
sea view for the same price as a typical "shoebox"
in Hong Kong, many conclude that the transaction
is worth the risk.
And, nearly nine years
after the return to Chinese sovereignty, the
people of Hong Kong are becoming increasingly
adept at balancing the risks and the rewards of
their unique relationship with the motherland.
Kent Ewing is a teacher and
writer at the Hong Kong International School. He
can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk
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