Last November, the Jiuhua Agricultural Science Demonstration Park in Xiaotangshan Township, Changping District, Beijing was demolished by the authorities. Although many owners stayed behind and went on hunger strike in protest, they were unable to stop the authorities from demolishing the park. As of the end of January, the entire plot had been demolished. The “Yuan’s Three Rites Residence”, a Ming Dynasty monument reconstructed by National Palace Museum scholar Zong Tongchang, was also not spared.
According to Radio Free Asia, on November 17 last year, hundreds of black-clothed people, consisting of triad members and foreign farmers employed by the local government, forcibly occupied the Jiuhua Agricultural Science and Technology Demonstration Park. Since then, the men in black have destroyed the community’s natural gas station and began gradually demolishing residential homes in the area from Nov. 25. By the end of December, half of the plot had been demolished and only 200-300 of the original 2,100-plus residents of the plot remained. As the community was cut off from water and electricity, those left behind had to cut wood for heating and cooking in the cold winter. Despite the hunger strike and the fact that some of them had fought with the black-clad people, they could not stop the advance of the black-clad people. By the end of January this year, all the houses in the area had been demolished to rubble.
Even a monument in the district called “Yuan’s Three Rites Residence” did not escape the fate of being demolished. The former residence of Yuan’s three rites was built in the Ming Dynasty and was originally located in the Xuanwu district of Beijing on Nanheng Street, the ancestral Home of Yuan Fuli, a geologist and archaeologist active in the late Qing Dynasty and one of the discoverers of the Yangshao Culture, Yuan Tongli, the former director of the Beijing Library, and Yuan Dunli, the former president of Beijing Normal University. He bought all the buildings in the five rooms of the building and had them dismantled and transported to the vacant land he rented in the Jiuhua Agricultural Science Demonstration Park for reconstruction. After ten years, Zong Tongchang poured out his pension and completed the reconstruction with the assistance of experts in accordance with the “Building Method”. However, just four years later, the building was once again faced with the fate of being demolished.
According to “NetEase News” on January 18 this year, Zong Tongchang had to personally carry out a preemptive demolition to save the building, in order to try to protect some parts of the building that have heritage value. In the bitterly cold climate, Zong Tongchang had multiple frostbite.
Another video interview with Zong Tongchang shows the old man living in a tent for a long Time in the cold winter to protect the building’s heritage value. Zong Tongchang said he hoped the authorities would give him some time to preserve the buildings of Yuan’s Sanli residence so that he could donate them to Mianchi County and other places in the future to preserve the value of these cultural relics. However, a netizen broke the news on Weibo, saying that on February 2, the former residence of Yuan’s three rites could not escape being demolished by force.
The netizen also said that the authorities practice forced demolition, using bulldozers directly to, so that a building all into rubble; while demolition can be dismantled in steps, most of the building materials can still be used.
The above-mentioned informed netizen also said that as of Feb. 13, Zong Tongchang was still at the site of the forced demolition, watching over the ruins of Yuan’s Sanli residence.
Demolition of small property rights houses designated as “illegal” has been a frequent activity in recent years across China. In the past year, Beijing alone has carried out forced demolitions of villas built in the countryside in Changping and Huairou districts on the grounds of “protecting the ecological environment,” without compensation and, in some cases, by assisting owners who agree to move or be temporarily relocated. In some cases, officials will assist owners who agree to move or temporarily relocate.
In some cases, officials assisted owners who agreed to move or temporarily relocate. The communities of Jiuhua Agricultural Science Demonstration Park in Xiaotangshan Town, Changping District, Wajao and Xiangtang Cultural Village in Changping District, Yayuan in Qiaozi Town, Huairou District, and the old Beijing courtyard in the Great Wall, Hanbilou in Qingdao, and Nansanpo in Hebei were all cleared of small property rights, involving tens of thousands of people.
Jiuhua Agricultural Science Demonstration Park an owner said that 20 years ago, Beijing Changping District Xiaotangshan set up an investment office to invite some professors and teachers from Tsinghua University and Peking University to develop ecological agriculture in the name of the town, each with about one or two acres of land, but also to build a small room. For twenty years, people followed the rules, planted trees, flowers, vegetables and introduced new varieties of horticulture.
The owner said that as the developers kept building commercial houses, causing the price of housing to rise, the government then started to tear up the original agreement, “the people who originally gave us the license are now sitting here again and started to direct the demolition team, forcibly demolishing us, to blow us out, saying that we violated the ‘small property rights’ “.
Another female owner said that they have a “land management right certificate” with the seal of the national emblem issued by Changping County Government and signed by the investment and development office of Xiaotangshan Township Government, which is valid from 1999 to 2049. They have invested a lot of money and effort in the land, as required by the contract, to build an orchard on the wasteland, and should continue to have the ownership of the land, facilities and crops.
However, both ordinary people and scholars and publicists have become the defenders of the demolition. Xing Xiaoqun, a retired professor of China Youth Politics College who lives in the new cultural village of Xiangtang in Changping District, which has been forcibly demolished, wrote: “I feel like myself and my neighbors are like lambs to be slaughtered; like the Jews in Germany and Poland who were driven to line up, driven to get on the bus, driven to be dragged to the concentration camp, and driven to walk into the incinerator.”
Another China University of Political Science and Law professor, Yang Yusheng, had gone on a hunger strike directly because of the forced demolition, but all to no avail.
Last April, five prominent scholars in Beijing, Guo Daohui, Zhang Qianfan, He Weifang, Sheng Hong, and Guo Yuhua, sent a joint letter to Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, “condemning the unconstitutional and illegal demolition campaign” and calling for an end to the horrific “demolition of citizens’ homes by illegal means.
The letter said, “In recent years, there have been large-scale illegal demolitions in Beijing and other places in the name of “demolition” that violate citizens’ rights to their homes and property. The organization, linking official positions and promotions to demolition “achievements,” has caused an even more negative and significant social impact, with serious violations of the right to housing, eviction and displacement of citizens living in their only homes; all citizens who have been illegally demolished have suffered huge property losses equivalent to their entire annual income for several years; their constitutional rights have been trampled on, and their human dignity has been destroyed. Their human dignity has been destroyed.”
But the letter was sent out and then dropped into thin air. Today, the middle class in Beijing is a new group defending housing rights. Luo Mingzhu, a Beijing-based entrepreneur now living in the United States and owner of the Jiuhua Agricultural Science Demonstration Park, said she would use her position in the United States to find a way to use the law as a weapon to sue the party officials in Xiaotangshan Township and its neighboring town Xingshou Township through the U.S. courts for directing the demolition.
She also said that her house had long been demolished by excavators and was one of the last few buildings in the neighborhood to be demolished. The demolition by the men in black was accompanied by looting. She said, “I spent more than ten years of hard work, carefully built home, was sent by the town government of Xiaotangshan dozens of people in black, broke into the door in a flurry, drove into the excavator forced demolition of my house. While they were demolishing the house, they were looting supplies. They are a group of robbers.”
Recent Comments