When you open a map of Beijing, the Second Ring Road is like an official seal placed on its side, and the waters of the Houhai are a leaf of emerald green dotted on it.
If you were suddenly the owner of one of the courtyards in this three-mile radius, would you be overwhelmed? But, seeing that the courtyard belongs to you can neither move in, nor share the high rent, nor get the title certificate, will you be angry?
For Mr. and Mrs. Wang Zhen Yuan and Mr. Hu Zhi Ying, who both passed away, this is a sad and happy problem for their children. Even with the help of the court, it is difficult to break this family matter.
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During the Nationalist government, he was the director of the Nanjing Supreme Court Office in Beiping and the secretary-general of Chaoyang University (one of the predecessors of Renmin University of China), the first law school. His wife, Hu Zhiying, was known as Hu Kuangtao. The couple had five children: Wang Fangwei (daughter), Wang Fangying (daughter), Wang Fangzhen, Wang Fangwei and Wang Fangjue (deceased).
After Wang Zhenyuan fled to Taiwan in 1949, Hu Zhiying bought the quadrangle at No. 49 (now No. 105) of Ju’er Hutong with the 6,000 foreign dollars he left behind. According to the real estate records, the house base covers an area of 360.22 square meters, and the floor area of the 13 rooms is 169.1 square meters.
Mistress Hu Zhiying with her five children (Photo by the author) Mistress Hu Zhiying with her five children (Photo by the author)
The courtyard, Beijing’s last cultural label, began when the Mongolian iron horsemen came south and Kublai settled in Yanjing, and has since changed through the generations, from the Ming Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty, and from the Republic to the current dynasty. In the last seventy years, from a countable 17 million to less than 3 million today, the total area is struggling to live and die in square meters.
An even greater change in property rights occurred during the Cultural Revolution, when the government took over the property from private ownership to public ownership. Hu Zhiying died in the second year of the Cultural Revolution, which tied the first knot in the ownership of the compound.
One day in 2015, I met the heirs of the Wang family who were arguing over the ownership of the compound at No. 105 Ju’er Hutong, so I observed the situation for a year and wrote down this story.
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Walking east from Yinjiaoqiao, through Hutong and Nanluoguxiang, it took only 20 minutes to reach House No. 105.
Wang Fangwei, 75, and Wang Fangzhen, 69, recall that the time they lived in the courtyard, though not necessarily rich, was the happiest.
The courtyard faces south, where the south room is adjacent to the street and runs through the hall, with a courtyard in the middle, compartments in the east and west, and three rooms and four shelves in the north. “There are two quadrangles, and there used to be a wall in the middle of the courtyard, with four exquisite wooden doors opening. We live in the north room, and the others are used for rent.” Wang Fangzhen said.
As the eldest daughter and son, the two also seem to have inherited their father’s migration genes – Wang Fangwei came from a teaching background and was later transferred to Tianjin; Wang Fangzhen moved to Qinhuangdao, married and had children. Of course, this is more of a family separation caused by the times.
After leaving Beijing in the late 80s and early 90s, they occasionally returned to live for a few days, and their own children’s childhoods have memories of this mansion.
Wang Fangjue died in 1985 and his wife Li Xiuying died in 2010 with a daughter named Wang Rui. Wang Fangying was born in January 1944, a retired employee of the Leather Industry School, and lives with his lover, who is a professor, at NUST.
The family of Wang Fangwei, the remaining second son, is the longest resident of the 105th courtyard, which they now rent out to catering companies. Wang Fangwei was an employee of Cable Factory No. 2 and his wife, Yang Xiufen, a nurse at Dongsi Maternity Hospital, are both retired.
According to Beijing Municipal Government Document No. 38 of 1983, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the city took over the private properties of more than 80,000 homeowners, totaling more than 510,000 rooms. Among them, there were more than 270,000 owner-occupied houses and more than 230,000 rental houses, with a total floor area of about 7.65 million square meters, equivalent to more than one-third of the houses in the city at the beginning of the liberation. The Wang family courtyard is just a little bit of this cold group of figures.
On June 23, 1984, the Dongcheng District Private Housing Office gave the Wang family the “Notice of Returning Private Housing Property Rights” with the number 996: “Now we are returning the property rights of the private housing in the year 966. “The 13 private houses in No. 105 Ju’er Hutong, Dongcheng District, which were handed over to the public in September 1966, will be returned to the property owner, who can take this notice to the District Real Estate Administration where the property is located to exchange for the property ownership certificate. This notice is not for the transfer of property rights certificate.”
The deadlock of property rights of a courtyard
This notice on the property rights of a total of six people: Wang Zhenyuan and five children. There is no Hu Zhiying, according to the Wang family, it is Wang Fangying who remembers the old days and adds his father’s name to the registration on his behalf. This is tantamount to adding another dead end.
The Beijing Notary Office’s official certificate No. 164 of 1987 says: “The heir, Hu Zhiying, died on June 7, 1967, leaving 17 and a half houses in Ju’er Hutong; the deceased was intestate during his lifetime, and the inheritance should be shared by his husband, Wang Zhenyuan, and six of his children.”
In the official documents, No. 105 courtyard changed from 13 rooms to 17 and a half because during the Wang family’s residence, four and a half new illegal buildings were built in the open space between the north house and the north wall, which was later expressed uniformly as 13 rooms.
At that time, the house in the empire is still cabbage price, the Wang family heirs do not seem to care about this courtyard, neither the division of inheritance, nor the title deeds on the heart. And then the soaring urban construction and geometric growth in housing prices changed all that.
In May 2009, Wang Fangzhen, who lives far away from Qinhuangdao, took his four siblings to court, thus starting a series of judicial proceedings. Wang Fangzhen claimed a one-sixth equal share of the quadrangle to enforce property rights.
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Property division, also known as property analysis, refers to the division of common property by agreement between the co-owners of the property according to certain criteria. The division of property usually occurs in the case of a large family split or a couple’s divorce, and there is a judicial interpretation by the Supreme Court that the division of property is generally preceded by inheritance.
There was only one courtyard, but there were six co-owners. Around this case, the Dongcheng District Court began a long investigation and trial. After the case was filed on May 7, 2009, the court originally had the acting judge Zhang Ming as the sole judge, but considering the complexity of the case, Liu Yan acted as the presiding judge instead and formed a panel with Zhang Ming and Han Xiaodong.
Since then, for more than three years, the case has been held six times, and the process includes determining Wang Zhen Yuan’s announcement and referring the case to a third party to evaluate the property. Wang Zhen Yuan did not appear in court to answer the lawsuit, nor did he submit a written defense. The five children jointly determined that he had died in Taiwan in 1981.
In response to his elder brother’s lawsuit, Wang Fangwei argued that the disputed house is now jointly held by Wang Fangwei and Wang Fangying, and that the other co-owners have relinquished their ownership by refusing to register the house and other forms, and that the case has exceeded the statutory statute of limitations. Wang Fangying agreed with this statement, but did not comment on the verdict and respected the court’s decision.
At this point, the five siblings of the Wang family actually formed two opposing parties, one being Wang Fangwei and Wang Fangying, and the current external rent, which was mainly allocated by the two, and Wang Fangwei accounted for the vast majority; while the other three parties could neither move in nor share in the millions of yuan of rent per year.
On September 5, 2011, the Dongcheng District Court ruled at first instance that “this case does not involve the statute of limitations” and decided as follows: a total of thirteen rooms, of which the first and second rooms to the east of Room 3 belong to Wang Fangwei; the third room belongs to Wang Zhenyuan; the first and second rooms to the east of Room 1 belong to Wang Fangying; the third and fourth rooms to the east of Room 1 belong to Wang Rui; and the second room to the east of Room 2 belongs to Wang Fangying. The third and fourth rooms in the east of the first room belong to Wang Rui; the third room in the second room belongs to Wang Fangzhen; and the third room in the fourth room belongs to Wang Fangwei. “The cost of building a partition wall by the neighboring parties shall be borne equally by the neighboring parties. All houses of the adjacent parties share the roof and walls of the house.”
In addition to this, Wang Fangwei, who received a larger share of the property, also paid compensation to others for their houses, including 56,000 yuan to Wang Fangzhen, 410,000 yuan to Wang Fangying, 1.05 million yuan to Wang Zhenyuan, 360,000 yuan to Wang Fangwei and 87,000 yuan to Wang Rui. “During the period when Wang Zhenyuan’s whereabouts are unknown, all his houses and the housing compensation due to him will be held by Wang Fangwei.”
If this was enforced, the deadlock of property rights of the 105th quadrangle could be successfully resolved. However, it was clear that Wang Fangwei was the owner and had no intention of yielding to his relatives. He appealed to the Beijing Second Intermediate Court, and successfully obtained a ruling of “cassation and remand”, and the case returned to the Dongcheng District Court.
On April 17, 2013, the case entered the second trial. The judge chose to recuse himself from the case, “The case was temporarily suspended, and the heirs will reopen the case after the court decided to claim one-fifth of each share of Wang Zhen Yuan as a decedent.”
So, the division of the case can not go, the succession lawsuit began.
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Wang Fangzhen, who had no choice, took the four siblings to court again in December 2014, asking for a clear inheritance relationship. Six months later, the Dongcheng District Court ruled in the first instance that the house renovation was rejected on the grounds that it had not been approved for planning purposes.
This civil ruling, made in April 2015, said that the 105th courtyard was renovated and altered without planning approval, resulting in the existing state of the house in dispute being different from the original state and unable to be divided for inheritance, so the suit was dismissed.
The alteration was masterminded by Wang Fangwei, who rented the quadrangle to a catering company and then performed a major surgery on the house without the approval of the planning department, which made the original court-ordered division of property scheme groundless.
Wang Fangzhen appealed this ruling to the Beijing Second Intermediate Court, which was also rejected. This meant that the inheritance case came to a dead end.
Later, after coordination, the siblings went to the Housing Bureau to apply for the title deed, but were told that all co-owners must be present at the same time to receive the title deed for the common property. Because the “Notice of Return of Private Property” had Wang Zhenyuan’s name on it, he naturally could not be present, making it impossible to proceed with the title deed.
Before the ‘Cultural Revolution’, Hu Zhiying’s name was listed in the “Real Estate Ownership Certificate” (Photo by the author)
In the case of dispossession and inheritance, the court twice accessed the records of the housing department and obtained two certificates issued by the latter – one on September 2, 2011.
one, dated September 2, 2011, from Judge Zhang Ming’s work transcript, showing that the contents of the present registration of the house are consistent with the contents of the archival materials provided by the parties, such as the registration of the title of the house and the number of common shares of the owner, and that “the title certificate has not been processed at the bureau so far”.
One is September 10, 2014, the housing management department replied to the Dongcheng District Court, after checking the registration file, the house No. 105 of Ju’er Hutong is jointly owned by six people, including Wang Zhenyuan, Wang Fangwei, Wang Fangying, Wang Fangzhen, Wang Fangwei and Wang Fangjue, “but the above six people have not applied for housing registration”.
The two certificates are slightly different, one is not to do the title certificate, one is not for housing registration, the nature is obviously different. The prosecution party vaguely feel that the series of lawsuits in a deadlock, there is a force in the continuous influence, resulting in two cases in a dead end.
The Dongcheng District Office of the private sector believes that the city is currently using the status quo return model, recognizing the status quo of renovation, and the planning and land department also provides for the renovation of private houses “without planning approval”. But the court deliberately stuck this, resulting in two cases can not continue.
In addition, the judge was reluctant to touch on the issue of Taiwan and the sea, and privately reasoned that even an official letter from the Office of the Landlord could not decide the inheritance case, and that the death certificate of Wang Zhen Yuan, stamped by a Taiwanese notary, and a certificate from his overseas family members renouncing the inheritance were required.
According to the new Property Law, property rights are not allowed to be handed over to co-owners in trust, and the judgment must be clear and cannot leave a tail. In this way, the first instance’s scheme of property division could not stand, and there is no precedent for the cross-strait judicial issues involved in this case.
According to this inference, there is another dead end: after Wang Zhen Yuan went to Taiwan, he left the government and became a lawyer, and remarried and had a daughter named Wang Fang Xin, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin. The second generation of the Wang family has been in contact with her for many years, and once requested the assistance of the Taiwan Office, but heard nothing from her.
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“One should get that real estate ownership certificate in Hu Zhiying’s name before the ‘Cultural Revolution’, not the Notice of Return of Private Property Rights, because the notice is only a policy instrument and the real estate ownership certificate is the legal basis.” said Hua Xinmin, who has long been concerned about the fate of the quadrangle.
Born in Beijing in 1954, Hua Xinmin grew up in a hutong. The blue-eyed Beijinger of Chinese, Polish and French heritage began calling for the preservation of the capital’s ancient city in the summer of 1997 to both Beijing and the central government, and is the author of “For a Hometown That Cannot Be Lost,” among other books.
On oldpek.com, initiated by Hua Xinmin, in addition to a collection of legal policies on private land property rights, some cases of rights defense, and a search system of Beijing’s land administration from 1949 to 1952, the 105th house of Ju’er Hutong, under the name of Hu Zhiying, is included, as evidenced by the announcement published in the People’s Daily.
Announcement in the People’s Daily (Photo by the author) Announcement in the People’s Daily (Photo by the author)
A group of statistics says that in Dongcheng District alone, there are more than a thousand property cases similar to the Wang family, which have been delayed in securing property rights because they involve family members moving overseas or dying in other countries.
The case of property analysis and inheritance has been stalemate, Wang Fangzhen, Wang Fangwei and others decided to sue the tenant of No. 105 courtyard, Yinxiang Bistro Restaurant Co. As co-owners of the property, they did not authorize anyone to rent their house, and the lessee was suspected of infringement.
In addition, this courtyard is not a commercial business place, Wang Fangwei was operating in the name of Beijing Temple Treasure Food Store, which promised in the business file that “only the area of Wang Fangwei’s house will be used and will not infringe on the interests of other heirs.”
The Temple Treasure Food Store later changed its name to Beijing One Zero Five Restaurant, and the business premises remained at No. 105 Ju’er Hutong, operated by Wang Fangwei’s wife Yang Xiufen. Wang Fangzhen, Wang Fangwei and Wang Rui all believe that this is a business violation. In addition to suing, they plan to complain to industry and commerce, city management, etc., in order to outlaw the other party’s business license.
Lawyers specializing in this area, this new prosecution, the court generally have to add all the heirs to participate in the proceedings, the announcement of Wang Zhen Yuan alone may take a year. Through litigation may not be resolved, turnkey or the best way to solve.
Wang Fangwei and Wang Fangzhen had entered the Indian Lane Bistro with illness last year, and then were carried out by the brawny men hired by the other party and were too scared to go back. They admitted that they, as property owners, did not do their duty to “manage the business”.
Brothers turned against each other, sisters became enemies, and had to give up family ties to fight for their rights, which is a bitter drama played out by many families. Now, the Wang family is just a different actor.
If the whereabouts of Wang Fangxin’s family are forever unknown, there may be only one way to resolve the matter, and that is to wait until the demolition of Ju’er Hutong, where the co-owners can get their share of the compensation without having to apply for a certificate of ownership. According to the 2015 standard, the amount of compensation for the demolition of this courtyard is nearly 70 million yuan.
But then, the kinship is like the broken glass at high altitude, the courtyard can not be repaired, the Wang family is difficult to reunite the mirror.
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