The following video reminded me of events I witnessed while I was in Beijing last summer. In particular, the government seizure and demolition of a noodle restaurant that I frequented with friends. Since we ate lunch there nearly everyday, we befriended the owners, a family of suburbanites that had come into Beijing to make extra money to supplement the income of their relatives. We spent our mornings in class studying Chinese law, which has due process rules similiar to our Fifth Amendment takings law. However, in China the government owns all of the land; consequently, everyone in China is renting their land from the government. When the government takes the land back, it is breaking its contract with the lessee, whom it compensates. The people that are not compensated are the people that have leased from the lessee and there is literally no recourse for these people.
Our friends at the noodle shop found themselves in this very predicament, and imagine our shock when our idealistic American world of just compensation was pummeled to rubble as we watched men with sledge hammers smashing the restaurant walls still adorned with simple framed pictures of China's majestic landscape. The former restauranteurs stood outside a cordon of police nonplussed-- their dishware shattered and their oven overturned-- we're still doing our best to make sense of the situation. This was my first experience of China's eminent domain policy and it certainly wasn't the last. The video may seem incredible, fantastical, and unbelievable, but it is an accurate depiction of a harsh reality.
Underground Video Of Tyranny In China - video powered by Metacafe
For more information, I recomment reading a recent post on China Confidential entitled, "More Armed Police Move Into Dongzhou Village" which discusses the recent villager uprisings in Dongzhou village near the Chinese southern port of Shanwei. Paramilitary forces shot and killed at least three people in Dongzhou in December 2005. The villagers were protesting what they said was inadequate compensation for land used to build a power station. Recently, the villagers seized eight government officials, demanding the release of a local activist. The incident was the latest in a two-year string of such occurrences in rural China, often brought on by discontent among farmers over the seizure of fields by local officials, who then sell the land for development. The villagers complain that the local authorities, in a deal with developers, seized the land, leaving farmers with nowhere to grow crops to sustain their families. They find themselves impoverished in the country's richest province, even as China's economy booms.
Also see the "Human Rights" section of UC Berkeley's China Digital Times.
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