Chinese people don’t take to the streets for freedom of speech, but when it comes to defending property, both decent middle-class and farming farmers will rise to the occasion; just this past 2020, people who bought rotten homes and were forcibly demolished shared their stories of resistance with reporters.
In September 2018, he followed hundreds of people to a district government in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, to protest against a pre-sale house he bought in 2016 that had not been built by the Time it was delivered in 2018, so he and other owners formed a WeChat group to discuss how to fight for their rights.
“That was the first time I took to the street (protest),” Mr. Zhuo told Central News Agency, despite their careful communication in the WeChat group, but still the police had the message. The first night he took to the streets, police knocked on his room door, “saying I was still a (Communist) Party member, how could I do that.”
By early 2019, Mr. Zhuo’s protest to redress his grievances escalated to the Jiangsu Provincial Petition Office, where he became one of the ringleaders, and put down the word: “If it is not dealt with, continue to petition in Beijing.”
During Mr. Zhuo’s two-year protest experience, he was lucky not to encounter uncivilized treatment, “The police came and just asked us not to make a scene.” The government is also sincere in helping to solve the problem, “but we are not allowed to find the media and send shake (audio-visual platform).” As for the resistance to his experience, it is “dare to shoot the table with the big leaders.
But Mr. Zhuo admits that different city governments vary greatly in their response to protests, with some protest sites clashing with police and then having multiple arrests.
Such stories are not the exception. In an article by WeChat’s Daily People at the end of October last year, “The Shattering Moment of the Middle Class’ Villa Dream,” some middle-class people in their 30s and 40s in Beijing reported that they were good enough in their field and believed that they could get a job. Believing they could match a better Life, they sold two generations of property for a suburban villa, which cost around RMB 16 million (about NTD 69.6 million).
Unexpectedly, the construction project was rotten, and these owners continued to hide their house from the elders of their families, lying to them that the house was still being built, while they could only extend the time they spent renting out their homes, suffering from tremendous financial pressure and psychological stress.
In the report, the parties could rationally and restrainedly talk about the experience of the rotting mansion, but talking about the process of defending their rights, the developers were intimidating and swearing on the phone, and the female owners lost control of their emotions saying, “Everyone is a dignified person and they all work in very good establishments, they never thought they would have to go through something like this in their lives.”
Mr. Zhuo’s story is considered to have a happy ending, under the supervision of the government, the homeowner’s advance payment was paid into an account designated by the government, which then found a builder to complete the construction. He got his new manufactured Home in July last year and resold it in October, making about 50 percent more than the purchase price more than four years ago.
From the beginning, Mr. Zhuo had no intention of going through the judicial route. They are convinced that they will not get their money back even if they win the lawsuit, so they prefer to be more pragmatic and try to get the construction project completed first.
In his opinion, whether the protest can have a good result, “really does not depend on how aggressive you are”, in his case, the main is that the building is near the local municipal government, the protest is too frequent government pressure; in addition, because the location is good, so the completion of the building will be able to get rid of, the government, the developer have the incentive to solve. However, the other local buildings that are in bad shape may not have a good ending.
Compared to Mr. Zhuo, Ms. Zhang, who fought against the forced demolition of her suburban home in Shanghai, was not so lucky.
Pointing to photos of herself being beaten and hospitalized by unknown people in 2016, she complained that her home had been forcibly demolished by people hired by the township government, arbitrarily selling the chickens and ducks and pigs she raised, and showed an administrative verdict from the Fengxian District Court in July 2018, which also stated that the forced demolition by the Jinhui township government was an administrative act in violation of the law.
However, when Ms. Zhang’s husband applied for compensation to the Jinhui Township Government in 2019, the township government suggested that there was an agreement between the two sides in 2012, so no state compensation would be granted. Ms. Zhang insisted that her husband’s signature on the so-called agreement was synthetic, and the Appraisal agency did not conclude this.
Defending the right to housing is not easy. Some petitioners take advantage of China’s annual “two sessions” in March to present their case, and this year it’s even harder for foreigners to enter Beijing because of the Epidemic. Ms. Zhang said it may be possible to write to several National People’s Congress deputies and CPPCC members instead.
The forced demolition controversy has always existed. Shangguan News reported that Tou Jiguang, a professor at Sichuan Normal University who fell to his death at the school on Jan. 18, had become increasingly depressed after reporting an official’s abuse of power and violent demolition of a citizen’s legal property in October last year.
Tou Jiguang was a journalist and a qualified lawyer, and his wife said her husband was frustrated by the demolition of his house and believed that “studying law and journalism will not save him.
Some local governments in China are still dependent on land finance, but the financial risks are also high, with construction cases being pushed one by one and news about forced demolitions and rotting homes popping up all over the place, which means there will be new people joining the long road to defend housing rights.
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