Note to developers and demolition crews: don’t think you can destroy a person’s home without a fight. Last year, Yang Youde kept bulldozers at bay by constructing a homemade cannon. Earlier this month, a woman killed herself and two local officials with a bomb. For basically as long as houses have been razed, people have resisted, and the latest example is possibly the best: Mr. Zhou, a 70-year-old pensioner decked in camo, hurls petrol bombs at trespassers in the above video, refusing to vacate his home to greedy developers and their multimillion-yuan project. He has turned his flat into a fortress, NBC Nightly News‘s Angus Walker tells us, and “defends his home like a Medieval castle.”
We wish Mr. Zhou best of luck. It’s almost impossible for him to “win” in any romantic sense, but if he gets enough publicity, maybe developers will be convinced to give him more money. As for the thousands of others who have similar complaints — the hundreds in his neighborhood, even — they’ll unfortunately have to live with the sad reality that is China’s policy regarding chai, demolition. As the tag to this post says — it just happens.
