Tuesday 26 January 2010

Development deaths prompt professors to issue reform call

Yue Xiyou died after trying to defend his fiancee’s flat from a wrecking crew. A woman named Tang Fuzhen protested against another demolition by standing on the roof and setting herself alight.

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Guanyu said...

Development deaths prompt professors to issue reform call

Associated Press
18 December 2009

Yue Xiyou died after trying to defend his fiancee’s flat from a wrecking crew. A woman named Tang Fuzhen protested against another demolition by standing on the roof and setting herself alight.

The struggle for urban land on the mainland - heightened this year by a massive government stimulus plan that eased bank loans for construction - has become increasingly violent as thousands of citizens lose their homes to new projects.

Upset at the social unrest, a group of five legal professors from the mainland’s top university is taking a rare public stand, calling for changes to a regulation that they say encourages abusive tactics by developers.

In crowded mainland cities, few issues are more sensitive than land. Property seizures are supposed to be limited to projects in the public interest, but complaints about forced demolitions for purely commercial developments are common.

Urban development is popular with local governments because it raises a city’s profile, brings in money and guarantees jobs for low-income workers. But some residents find themselves under steady pressure by officials, developers or even hired thugs to get out of the way.

In Beijing alone, some activists said more than a million people were forced from their homes to make way for new sports venues for last year’s Olympics. Elsewhere, government officials have often sided with developers, touching off riots and protests. Once in motion, demolitions and relocations are rarely stopped. They sometimes turn violent.

Last month, Yue, a 29-year-old teacher in the southwestern province of Yunnan, tried to stop a demolition crew that wanted to knock down a wall of his fiancee’s home to build a shopping centre and apartment building next door. A fight ensued.

“Several of their men started to hit him with steel bars,” Liping, the mother of Yue’s fiancee, said. Yue died after two weeks in a hospital. “He died of bleeding in the brain.”

Three of the demolition workers have been detained. Local police would not comment.

The case of Tang Fuzhen was more extreme. Last month, she protested against the demolition of her ex-husband’s factory in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan in the southwest, by dousing herself with petrol. Photos and a video of her death exploded across national media, prompting outrage.

Last week, the professors sent a letter calling for reform. The central government has never liked organised challenges. But in the past, it has responded to high-profile calls for change after particularly shocking cases were made public.

Experts such as Gu Yunchang, vice-chairman of the China Real Estate Research Institute, say China’s stimulus plan with its easier bank loans has helped fund a jump in development projects this year.

New loans for real estate development surged 121 per cent nationwide in the first six months of this year, compared with the same period last year, to 403.9 billion yuan (HK$458 billion), the People’s Bank of China said.

The amount of land under new development is up as well. From January to last month, the land where building started was up 15.8 per cent, with a combined size of 976 million square metres, the National Bureau of Statistics said. That added up to combined construction sites larger than New York City.

Reforming urban development might impact the mainland’s pace of economic growth, but the government must take back the role of taking land and compensating people, said Shen Kui, one of the professors who signed the letter seeking reform.

“Our purpose is to deliberately slow the process and let it be more close to the process in western countries, so that people’s property rights are better protected,” he said.

One participant in Wednesday’s online forum, using the nickname Iron Rice Bowl Era Left Behind, asked simply: “Why is it that every time before an evil law is changed, a price has to be paid in blood?”