New York Times
A Woman Burns
By ROGER COHEN, Op-Ed Columnist
CHENGDU, CHINA — Tang Huiqin got
between China and its ferocious development push and still bears the
scars. I found her, traumatized and trembling, in the northern
outskirts of this vast city, where it’s common to see old houses with a
single Chinese character scrawled in red on the facade: “Demolish.”
The thugs from the city demolition squad rolled into her
neighborhood, a village called Jinhua now engulfed by urban sprawl,
early on Nov. 13. A road was to be built and nothing — not women, nor
children, nor years of painstaking homebuilding — was to stand in its
way.
“They were beating me, beating me, and I could hear my younger
sister, on the highest part of the roof, screaming ‘Older sister, older
brother, have you been beaten to death?’” Tang, 53, told me. “I could
hear her voice but I had blacked out from the beating and could not
speak.”
We were seated in the courtyard of Tang’s simple home, adjacent to
her sister’s house, now reduced to rubble. Chickens strutted about.
Tang had just emerged from the hospital. A large reddish scar cut
across her forehead. She was nervous. It can be dangerous in China to
speak out, to speak truth to power. Tang stood up and raised her shirt
to reveal severe bruising all down her left flank.
Tears filled her eyes. She averted them. Her younger sister was called Tang Fuzhen. She’s dead now.
On that day, Nov. 13, as Tang Fuzhen yelled at the demolition brutes
to stop the violence against her siblings, as she pleaded with them to
leave her house intact, she doused herself three times in gasoline,
saying she would set herself on fire, right there on the roof, if the
beating of her family continued.
The blows continued to rain down and the self-immolation of Tang
Fuzhen, 47, was added to the long list of victims of explosive Chinese
development.
The nexus of that growth often comes down to real estate: Who owns
it, who gets the sweet deals on it, who gets ousted, and who among
Communist Party officials and their developer cronies pockets the big
bucks from the infrastructure, business and residential projects that
have turned China into a monumental construction site.
The equation of the Chinese growth story that is changing the world
(and keeping U.S. Wal-Mart customers happy) is unforgiving: Ten percent
annual expansion is the guarantor of the Communist Party’s hold on
power and so everything will be done to sustain it. Agonized debate
(think U.S. health care reform or Afghan deployment) is not for China.
Bulldozers are more its thing.
The thrill of living in China is this very short distance between
words and action. Few Western executives are immune to the frisson.
Forget Indian democratic dithering! Nowhere else are projects so
intimate with their execution.
That’s fundamental to the forced quick-march of 1.3 billion people
to modernity. It can be very seductive, this fast train to the future,
because you live on the cusp of a great and stirring transformation.
You are part of history, an actor in an essential drama, not sitting on
the weary European sidelines! But its underside is often trampled lives.
Tang Huiqin’s life is in shreds after her sister’s death. Her
daughter, Wei Jiao, 25, paced about. How long until the police would
come and interrupt our conversation? Wei recalled what happened that
day, two months ago, when her aunt became a ball of flames.
“I was holding my daughter, who’s less than one year old, and they
were beating us with lead pipes,” she told me. “My daughter fell on me
and they were spraying this stinging substance in our eyes. Then they
grabbed my child and they were kicking me in the legs and back. I
wanted to cry out, but I couldn’t, I was lying on the ground shaking,
and I heard them say, ‘Take their cellphones!’”
Wei began to cry. “My aunt was a really good person. Everyone got
help from her. She liked to make herself pretty and she was very
industrious. I never thought she would go to such lengths, that she
would want to die. I can hear her still saying ‘I’ll come down if
everyone leaves. I just want everyone to leave!’ They pushed her to
this.”
Tang Fuzhen was a successful woman. She and her husband had been in
Jinhua for more than a decade, building a clothing wholesale business
called Aoshiwei. They had been courted by local party officials to
install their company in the area and, according to local press
reports, had invested close to $450,000 in a three-story building with
a factory on the first two floors and their home on the third. They had
a son studying in Britain and a teenage adopted daughter.
Although once touted as model entrepreneurs — profiled in newspapers
and on local TV — they had, since 2007, run into a familiar conflict in
China stemming from the confluence of murky property rights, soaring
real estate prices, land-hungry businessmen and rampant corruption
linking party officials with developers.
“Land use is a huge issue because, in the absence of property taxes,
local city authorities have to keep selling land and developing land to
stay afloat financially,” one Western official told me. “Chengdu gets
about 30 percent of its city budget from sales of land owned by the
state or the military. The government has to keep monetizing the land
through long-term leases, and of course corrupt officials want to make
money by getting bribes and other gifts from the buyers.”
Arthur Kroeber, an economist, told me that as much as 50 percent of
local government revenues came from land sales throughout China in
2009. “The financial interests of a lot of powerful people hinge on the
real estate boom. That’s where the big capital gains are.” The
real-estate bicycle is the get-rich-quick bicycle: Everyone in the game
has to keep pedaling!
For Tang Fuzhen, who was estranged from her husband, the building
local authorities coveted was at once her home and her factory. She
derided the offers of compensation, a mere fraction of the market
value. Official and market prices often bear no relation to each other
in China. But the city, determined to build a road to a new water
treatment plant, would hear none of her protests.
The conflict came to a head on that roof. Tang Fuzhen burned for a
long time. Wei Jiao, her niece, was in the ambulance with her.
“There was no skin on her arms and face, just exposed flesh,” she
told me. “Her teeth were completely black. She had no eyelashes or
hair. And she said, ‘Jiao, Jiao, I just want to die, I just want to
die.’ And I knew it was not the physical pain. It was the feeling in
her heart of watching her family being beaten and the house she built
with her labor destroyed. And I told her to try to hold on until we got
to the hospital.”
Tang Fuzhen did hold on for a while. But on Nov. 29, 16 days after her self-immolation, she succumbed to the burns.
Her suicide was caught on video by a neighbor and spread across the
Internet. An outcry ensued. A local inquiry found the demolition
process legal, but deemed the eviction “mismanaged” and a city official
was fired. Professors at Beijing University Law School wrote to the
People’s Congress, in theory the highest legislative body, suggesting
changes to the law to ensure compensation is adequate, that it’s paid
before demolition, that violence is never used, and that owners can sue
to contest eviction rulings.
These reforms are urgently needed. They would bring development and
individual rights into some balance and slow the fast-money corruption
machine. But the entrenched interests behind brutal expropriation are
enormous.
Across China, I sensed great anger at the raging real estate game in
which the party plays such a central role. On a vast half-built
development in Chongqing, a dozen banners had been draped from windows:
“Try to support our peasant brothers in getting the blood, sweat and
tears money owed to them by the developers.”
Here in Chengdu, on entire city blocks marked for demolition, there
were banners urging China’s leaders to “reflect the wishes of the
people” by reforming the way land is acquired.
Meanwhile, property seizures continue apace. The road between Jinhua
and downtown Chengdu is buried in dust and rubble. Posters and banners
beside the road show images of verdant fields, flowering shrubs, trees,
superhighways, high-speed trains, gleaming office blocks, elegant
executives — an almost comical imagined paradise of affluent
21st-century development in the midst of construction mayhem. I saw a
man, seated beside a dead bush overwhelmed by the dust, cleaving a
just-killed chicken beneath a photograph of white doves and a white
horse bearing a beautiful woman off to her dream home.
“Today’s irritation is for tomorrow’s convenience,” said one sign.
Another said, “Create a green culture!” A third tried this: “Be
cultural citizens. Construct a cultural city!” And everywhere I looked
there was demolition, disarray, destitution.
I asked Tang how she felt now. “Helpless,” she said. And when at
last I stepped outside, the police were of course waiting. “Your
papers,” they demanded. A few yards away workers labored on a road
where a home once stood and a woman burned.
original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/opinion/26iht-edcohen.html?ref=global-home
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