On Jan. 29, 2021, Wu Huaiyun returned to the Luoyanghe Village Weizi team and photographed the weed-filled ground with piles of rubble visible in the distance.
Several informed sources told the station that last August, just as China’s local economy was gradually recovering from the New Crown Epidemic, the government of Hengshan Township in Huoshan County, Anhui Province, forcibly expropriated nearly 1,000 acres of good land in three local villages and eight villager groups without higher-level approval, and demolished the villagers’ original houses after the forced relocation. The government has been tight-lipped about the purpose of the expropriation, and the plots of land are still deserted. Radio Free Asia correspondent Jia Ao wrote two episodes of the feature story, listen to the next episode today.
What happened to a veteran, party member and captain
Yang Yihe, 69, a veteran of the Luoyang River, lost his old house, which he had lived in for decades, in the demolition. He joined the army in 1969 and joined the Party before he was discharged in 1975, and served as the captain of Mojiapang team for many years.
As an old villager, he could not hide his attachment to his hometown. He said that before the government expropriated the land, the village fields were spectacular.
“Hundreds of acres, endless are good fields na. Those good fields are two mu a field, two mu and another field, all so big.”
Wuzi team villagers Wu Huaiyun in the demolition of six months after returning to the old Home, see a completely different scene. She provided reporters with several videos taken recently showing the empty village littered with broken bricks and tiles, with patches of rubble piled into mountains in some places. Most of the farmland in the countryside is full of weeds and is completely unrecognizable from its original appearance, but there are still a few surviving vegetable fields in the village, and the green base color has become almost the only color of Life here. Wu Huaiyun said that although the villagers’ land had been expropriated last year, their fish ponds and vegetable gardens were still the same as before. Some villagers who have moved away do not want to leave their land behind and still drive back to plant.
Yang Yihe, captain of the Mojiapang team, introduced that he built a brick house for his Family in the 1980s, with five rooms in total. His and his wife’s two rooms plus a duplex house add up to 71 square meters. His son exchanged a county house from the government a few years ago, and the three rooms originally belonging to his son have long been demolished.
He revealed that in recent years, the government has not allowed villagers to build new houses on the grounds of local “development”, but there are still some people secretly built a few hundred square meters of small buildings. As an old party member and captain, he can only live in his old house for a long Time, but over time, of course, the feelings.
August 9, 2020, Luoyang River Village Weizi team of a house to be demolished, the yard scattered with broken window glass. (Courtesy of Wu Huaiyun)
The “lightning” demolition that took people by surprise
Yang Yihe recalls that last year’s demolition was sudden and decisive.
“The government told us on August 12 that it was going to demolish our houses, and on the 20th it demolished all our houses, giving us only 10 days to demolish them.
He said that the government demolished his house in such a hurry and pushed out the seedlings on his hill without prior coordination with him. Local officials also claimed that if anyone’s family did not want to demolish it, the government would deduct 1,000 yuan per mu from their seedling fee.
Yang Yihe told the station that the government gave him two compensation packages for the demolition: if he chose cash, he could only get more than 10,000 yuan. If he chose the house note, he could get nearly 300,000 yuan. But since his son had previously exchanged a house in the city, the government did not allow him to build his own. He strongly disagreed with both options, so he said he began to experience inexplicable suppression. First, there was a land boundary dispute between the Mojiapong team and the Yaufang team, and then the government investigated members of the five-member Mojiapong team, including him, on the grounds of gambling. As individual villagers suspected that he had reported the gambling to the police, a family member even beat him up, and his old house was quietly demolished.
“I was in hospital when the house was demolished and I was injured by a member of our production team when she hit me with a kettle and I had seven stitches in my arm.”
Old house not enough to replace new one
After some twists and turns, Yang Yihe finally opted for a house note of more than 290,000 yuan. He bought a 520,000 yuan, 115 meters square meters house in the east of the city, because the house note is far from enough money to buy a new house, his son also took out a loan of 210,000 yuan for this purpose. Currently, he is living on loan in his son’s house, plus three generations of grandchildren.
He also revealed that the 10.5 million yuan promised by the government to Mojiapeng’s team for land acquisition has not yet been put in place because the land dispute created by local officials previously remains unresolved, and this amount is obviously a considerable amount for this villager group of less than 100 people.
Yang Yihe, who is nearing old age, has not been idle lately. He works as an administrator in a vegetable market in Huoshan Economic Development Zone during the day, and is currently engaged in taking temperatures, administering Medicine and other epidemic prevention work. He lamented that, as a 40-year-old party member, he believes that the local government has not thought about the public at all in the demolition process.
“I think this time the government not only did not protect the interests of the masses, they also set up a trap for some of them. I’ve been a party member for so many years and have always been loyal to the party, but now I’ve gotten into a deadlock with the government.”
A house to be demolished in Luoyanghe Village’s Weizi team on Aug. 9, 2020, with demolition garbage visible everywhere inside and outside the yard. (Courtesy of Wu Huaiyun)
No house, no demolition treatment?
Wu Huaiyun, a 51-year-old freelance Writer, told reporters that she had been unmarried, had an account and land, but had been homeless, and laughed that she was typically a “daughter with a boy’s life”. She has applied many times before to build a house according to the “one house per family” policy, but the government has always refused to approve it on the grounds that the local area is to be developed, so she still has no house. In recent years, she has been living in a small rental room in the county. In this room of only eight square meters, she also runs a typing and copying department, whose meager profits barely cover her rent and daily expenses.
She said that although she was not compensated for the demolition of her house, she should still be entitled to resettlement fees and “one house per family”, but Hengshan town officials had previously told her that because she did not have a house, she would not be entitled to any demolition benefits other than compensation for land acquisition. Therefore, the forced demolition not only violated the collective interests of the village, but also her personal rights and interests, which made Wu Huaiyun, who was already strong, even more indignant. She went to the provincial, county, town, village and other departments at all levels to reflect the problem, but was always “kicked in the balls”.
“You may die, you may survive, but you must be retreating from the abyss, but how I try now is useless. I think I’ve seen it all. If the system doesn’t change, it’s useless to try our best.”
Land requisition documents allegedly falsified
Wu Huaiyun in the article exposed a dated August 10, 2020 “land acquisition agreement” shows that the Luoyang River Village Committee and the villagers of the Weizi group reached an agreement, for the “county key project construction needs”, the village committee needs to the Weizi team to expropriate more than 230 acres of “garden land “, compensation of more than 48,000 yuan per mu, the team total compensation of about 11.5 million yuan. And another document called “land acquisition compensation and resettlement program no objection back to the certificate” shows that the village committee did not fill in the delineated part of any content, but obtained the signatures and handprints of more than a dozen village representatives.
Wu Huaiyun deduced that the authorities clearly expropriated mostly paddy fields, but claimed in the document that the expropriation was for garden land, which was clearly an attempt to evade responsibility.
“Expropriation of permanent farmland requires the approval of the State Council, which does not allow local governments to expropriate without permission. After the demolition, the authorities wrote on the agreements of our eight teams that the land was expropriated, but did not dare to write that it was good land.
Authorities demanded “first move and then talk”
Speaking of transposition, and Wu Huaiyun the same group of villagers in the polder team Guo Zhongde is also a belly full of bitterness. He previously heard from the village leaders that the town had put forward the condition of “clearing out first, then resettlement”, which meant that he had no idea what he would enjoy before moving.
“After you have cleared your home, cut off the water and electricity, you have to report the meter to the electricity bureau, which will give you a certificate of cancellation before you can go to the government to talk about the compensation package.”
Guo Zhongde told reporters that the house he was demolished was a 228-square-meter reinforced concrete building built by his family in 2001, with tiled exterior walls. He said the government only told them to demolish the house at the end of July last year, and they moved in around August 5, five days after the authorities opened the demolition.
He said that after the original house was vacated, the government gave three compensation packages: 720,000 yuan in house bills, 500,000 yuan in cash or more than 300,000 yuan in self-build subsidies, plus 130,000 yuan in decoration compensation. After calculating, he chose to receive the housing voucher, and then ordered a new house of 550,000 yuan and 120 square meters in the county, and took the remaining 100,000-plus housing vouchers for his father to buy a smaller house in the same neighborhood. Because the developer will not deliver the house until next summer, he and his wife and children currently live temporarily in the dormitory of the textile factory where he works, space is obviously much smaller than the old house.
The farmers’ lifeblood is gone
Guo Zhongde says that although the housing voucher seems like a wise choice, the unit price of commercial housing and renovation costs in the city today are much more expensive than self-built houses, and this compensation will not bring back his family’s original standard of living.
The 39-year-old villager also told the station that there are 34 families and 170 people in the Weizi team. The government expropriated more than 200 mu of their land and compensated them with a total of 11.5 million yuan, but on average each person only received more than 60,000 yuan. Guo Zhongde lamented that the loss of land had cost them their livelihood.
“We lost the land permanently, how come the government only compensated tens of thousands of dollars per mu? Now our whole family has no more land, but the government has not talked about our future livelihood security. No one has given a clear answer as to whether I have social security and pension protection or not.”
Wu Huaiyun, a villager from the polder team, said that until today, there are still many villagers who are still upset about the demolition. Some people want to petition, but fear government retaliation, coupled with many people are working outside during the day, do not want to take time off as a last resort, it is difficult to unite on the rights work. But she said that she would continue to work on this for her own sake and for the sake of her folks.
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