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January 26, 2010
A Woman Burns
The New York Times
by Roger Cohen
Hypocrisy alert! In a must-read, Times op-ed columnist Roger Cohen decries eminent domain abuse in China, but substitute "Brooklyn" for "Chengdu" and "New York State" for "China," accept that Daniel Goldstein is likely not considering self-immolation, and hope that government thugs won't beat Freddy's patrons chained to the bar, and things don't sound very different at all from the Atlantic Yards and Columbia University projects the paper cheers on its editorial page.
Oh, yeah, there is one difference: the Chinese land grab that Cohen recounts was for the building of a road — a traditional public use — not for a private basketball arena.
We were seated in the courtyard of Tang’s simple home, adjacent to her sister’s house, now reduced to rubble. Chickens strutted about. Tang had just emerged from the hospital. A large reddish scar cut across her forehead. She was nervous. It can be dangerous in China to speak out, to speak truth to power. Tang stood up and raised her shirt to reveal severe bruising all down her left flank.
Tears filled her eyes. She averted them. Her younger sister was called Tang Fuzhen. She’s dead now.
On that day, Nov. 13, as Tang Fuzhen yelled at the demolition brutes to stop the violence against her siblings, as she pleaded with them to leave her house intact, she doused herself three times in gasoline, saying she would set herself on fire, right there on the roof, if the beating of her family continued.
The blows continued to rain down and the self-immolation of Tang Fuzhen, 47, was added to the long list of victims of explosive Chinese development.
The nexus of that growth often comes down to real estate: Who owns it, who gets the sweet deals on it, who gets ousted, and who among Communist Party officials and their developer cronies pockets the big bucks from the infrastructure, business and residential projects that have turned China into a monumental construction site.
...Tang Fuzhen was a successful woman. She and her husband had been in Jinhua for more than a decade, building a clothing wholesale business called Aoshiwei. They had been courted by local party officials to install their company in the area and, according to local press reports, had invested close to $450,000 in a three-story building with a factory on the first two floors and their home on the third. They had a son studying in Britain and a teenage adopted daughter.
Although once touted as model entrepreneurs — profiled in newspapers and on local TV — they had, since 2007, run into a familiar conflict in China stemming from the confluence of murky property rights, soaring real estate prices, land-hungry businessmen and rampant corruption linking party officials with developers.
“Land use is a huge issue because, in the absence of property taxes, local city authorities have to keep selling land and developing land to stay afloat financially,” one Western official told me. “Chengdu gets about 30 percent of its city budget from sales of land owned by the state or the military. The government has to keep monetizing the land through long-term leases, and of course corrupt officials want to make money by getting bribes and other gifts from the buyers.”
...For Tang Fuzhen, who was estranged from her husband, the building local authorities coveted was at once her home and her factory. She derided the offers of compensation, a mere fraction of the market value. Official and market prices often bear no relation to each other in China. But the city, determined to build a road to a new water treatment plant, would hear none of her protests.
The conflict came to a head on that roof. Tang Fuzhen burned for a long time. Wei Jiao, her niece, was in the ambulance with her.
...Her suicide was caught on video by a neighbor and spread across the Internet. An outcry ensued. A local inquiry found the demolition process legal, but deemed the eviction “mismanaged” and a city official was fired. Professors at Beijing University Law School wrote to the People’s Congress, in theory the highest legislative body, suggesting changes to the law to ensure compensation is adequate, that it’s paid before demolition, that violence is never used, and that owners can sue to contest eviction rulings.
These reforms are urgently needed. They would bring development and individual rights into some balance and slow the fast-money corruption machine. But the entrenched interests behind brutal expropriation are enormous.
Across China, I sensed great anger at the raging real estate game in which the party plays such a central role. On a vast half-built development in Chongqing, a dozen banners had been draped from windows: “Try to support our peasant brothers in getting the blood, sweat and tears money owed to them by the developers.”
Here in Chengdu, on entire city blocks marked for demolition, there were banners urging China’s leaders to “reflect the wishes of the people” by reforming the way land is acquired.
NoLandGrab: Just like in New York State, except here, The New York Times is blind to the problem.
Posted by eric at January 26, 2010 4:28 PM