Chairman Mao once said, “Without destruction there is not construction. The destruction is the criticism, the revolution. The destruction comes first, it of course brings the construction.”  In recent years this quote has been taken literally, and the character 拆 (chāi), which means to “tear down,” adorns the entrances of many-a-doomed domiciles. The phenomenon has evolved so that the Chinese have nicknamed their country 拆那 (chāinà – get it?), referring to the daily razings that make way for growth.

This HULK SMASH!!!! approach to development has led to some stubborn residents refusing to give up their homes, “squatting” in nail houses that impede new construction. Those forced out leave messages telling others how they lost their homes. The graffiti protests are often painted over, silencing the affected.

Institutionalized Incentives

Land is owned by the state, with individuals and groups being able to lease the land for 70 years or less. Local and municipal governments leverage this asset by selling land leases to developers, leaving the residents with little say and little compensation. Developers get rich. Government officials get rich.

Moreover, this push for land development has been institutionalized by the central government in a series of incentives set by the Communist Party of China Organization Department. A long list of performance indicators gauge the efficacy of local party bosses, and GDP growth tops the list.  The easiest way to hit that target? Why, land sales and infrastructure investment, of course!

In fact, these incentives have warped the construction sector to the point of projects of planned obsolescence. Poor materials, untrained workers and accelerated timelines have led to some shoddy construction, with the lifespan of many residential structures clocking in at 20 years. The logic behind such irresponsible development? Demolition to make way for construction looks better for the numbers than renovation. It’s doubtful Mao foresaw such capitalist implications when he espoused his theory on destruction and construction.

Bubble Glut, Bubble Bubble Bubble Glut

This has created a property glut of epic proportions. Land-rich areas with few tax-paying individuals depend on real estate leases to generate revenue. Thus, gargantuan development projects have sprung up where no one wants them, initially designed to boost growth and business tax revenue, but ultimately leading to a lot of waste and pollution. Ghost towns pepper the country to the tune of some 68 million empty units. Meanwhile in urban centers, skyrocketing rent prices and strict purchasing restrictions have caused a massive housing shortage. Groups known as “rat and ant tribes” live in a modern dystopia, sardined underground as a testament to the ugly imbalance of resources and development (Vice Japan does an awesome feature about them).

It’s the Economy, Stupid

China saw housing market downturns after 2008 and 2011, but 2014’s looking at a possible property bubble pop, splooging a mix of sticky self-pity and gooey regret everywhere. That would be bad — real bad — since real estate accounts for 15% of China’s GDP, and such a large sector of the world’s second largest economy deflated too quickly would mean the entire globe would get splooge all over it.

In response to ballooning government debt, developer funding shortages and falling home sales, Premiere Li Keqiang has enacted a few “micro-stimuli” measures to avoid a crash. The PRC is now regulating loans made to developers and using targeted measures to encourage home-buying of existing units. To come: structural reforms moving the economy from an investment-led growth model into a consumption-based one. China will hopefully grow out of its “chai na” phase, an anti-climatic maturing that would be way better than any alternative… SPLOOGE.

Further reading:

- Seriously, China File’s people are killin’ the infographic game.

- Many thanks to fellow Carletonian Austin Hall for letting me showcase his deft hands from the video “Daft Hands.”

- Shoutout to Shanghai’s Basement 6 for their creative destruction with Shanghai 拆’s.

“Nail house” refers to the homes of owners too stubborn to give in to developers. These people stand alone, with their house, while their neighbors depart, and their neighborhood crumbles, and a new world stamps the words BEYOND HELP onto their heads. Often, that stamp looks like this: 拆. Sometimes, it looks like the above: walls leaning against one another to keep from falling; a roof halfway torn off by a force of mankind. Here it is: the poverty of living in modern China.

This from Hug China:

The nail house that was widely reported by Chinese online media on Sunday is seen to stand on a mound in middle of a vast construction site in Daigongmiao village, Xingcheng town, Wangcheng district in Changsha city.

And images via CRI:

And a poem by Adrienne Rich:

The Ballad of the Poverties
By Adrienne Rich

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There’s the poverty of theory poverty of the swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma mill the ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at immigration
The poverty of the turned head, the averted eyes
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check the poverty of the dumpster dive
The poverty of the pawned horn the poverty of the smashed reading glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty cleaning up the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed-out on pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched-up to sell there
There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There’s the poverty of prescriptions who can afford
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can’t get to the poverty of the salary cut
There’s the poverty of human labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There’s the poverty of yard sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here’s a mirror you can look into: take it: it’s yours.

How many princelings know it: the poverty of the nail house and the poverty of the condominium. Poverties upon poverties.

A 700-year-old tree in Shifang, Sichuan province withstood the efforts of a crane trying to secretly knock it down. Check it out. That’s what happens when an immovable object is actually immovable: 30 meters tall, 2.4 meters in diameter, apparently.

Via Hug China:

A local timber trader brought with his workers and secretly felled down a 700-year old tree in a Nanmu village, Bingchuan town, Shifang city, Sichuan province, and then when they tried to haul away the tree with a crane, the tree was so heavy that it overturned the crane, Ifeng.com reported Friday.

Of course, the crane would eventually tie the score at 1 apiece by actually destroying the tree.

Chinese netizens have overwhelmingly expressed anger and grief over the death of the ancient tree and hailed the overturn of the crane as nemesis invited by what the thieves had done.

Nature is fucked, as are we.

700-year-old tree secretly chopped down but too heavy to be hauled away, overturns crane (Hug China)

So, who wants to be a chengguan?

chinaSMACK reports via Beijing Times that 19 chengguan in Xiamen, Fujian province were victims of a sulfuric acid attack on October 16, with 18 of them needing hospital treatment.

Yesterday, Xiamen city Tong’an district City Management and Administration Law Enforcement Agency Joint-Section chief confirmed this incident to this Beijing Times reporter and said the chengguan team members were handling a Land and Resources Bureau’s aerial photography case at the time of the incident, and this incident caused various degrees of burns to 19 chengguan team members with 18 of them being hospitalized for treatment.

Feel sorry for them, feel sorry for them not. Feel sorry for them…

You can watch the moment a villager supposedly attacked the chengguan in the above video. Interestingly, when chengguan travel in packs like this, there’s always someone holding a camcorder, probably to capture exactly these type of unprovoked attacks.

Of course, there was provocation, in the form of a bulldozer running over someone’s home. Something tells us this little fact will be deemed irrelevant in a court of law.

Sulfuric Acid Thrown at Chengguan in Xiamen, 18 Hospitalized (chinaSMACK)

While the central government technically owns all land in China, it’s standard practice to issue long-term leases of up to 70 years to would-be residential property owners. Certain restrictions apply, but land grant contracts are usually 70 years, and that’s that.

One particular land and resources bureau, however, apparently missed that memo about “70 years.” Either that or it felt properly high and mighty as to openly flaunt a purposefully wrong interpretation of Chinese property law.

in Liangzhou, Sichuan province back in June 2011, a netizen noticed that his city’s land use right only granted 40 years, not 70, as in neighboring counties. (While this happened two years ago, this story was only recently reported on by Chinese media, and brought to our attention by Hug China.) The netizen raised a very reasonable question on the Liangzhong Bureau of Land and Resources website, basically: What gives?

Liangzhou officials responded with two answers:

1. Land laws stipulate that land usage rights can be up to 70 years, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be 70 years.

We’d be curious to know what officials in Beijing think of this interpretation. Liangzhou shrugs at national regulations because it thinks it can just make its own. Hmm, that’ll go over well.

Reason No. 2 is the more ridiculous of the two though:

2. After 40 years, will we still be here in this world? Don’t think too long-term.

This display of bureaucratic impudence — an attempt at snark that actually just makes this Liangzhou bureau look like a massive dick — was quickly derided by netizens as “God’s reply.” Hug in China has translated a sampling of messages on Sina Weibo:

@_NJ亚亚: Let it be! There is nothing left for us to keep long term since air was regarded as public property in the Heavenly Dynasty.

@敲键盘大师兄：The official tells the truth. He does not know either whether the darling party state will still exist after 40 years.

@有饭大师：Eh, it is difficult to say whether your party can survive another 40 years.

@诚橙数码V：Property right is reduced by half, how about the property price?

@supernatural2013：The government goes insane.

The mockery is obvious, as is the cynicism. “Will the Chinese Communist Party still be around in 40 years?” isn’t a joke that goes over well with Internet censors, but they have to tolerate it because an agency in some Sichuan city decided to be cute.

Your move, Liangzhou. Rectify this.

“Officials of Bureau of Liangzhong Land & Resources updated the post on Sunday and apologized for the ‘inappropriate wording,’” Hug in China reports.

Maybe they got the memo after all — a late one, faxed in by a higher office, telling everyone to get their shit together.

Sichuan officials tell netizens not to think too long term… (Hug in China)

The character for demolish (or dismantle) — 拆, chai – appeared on the Chinese embassy in Washington DC on Wednesday morning. According to Voice of America, the characters appeared three times: on two of the pillars on the embassy’s front gate, and on the entrance of an office building.

This happened on the same day as the opening of the fifth annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue, a two-day session between top leaders of China and the US. Vice President Joe Biden started talks by telling China to stop hacking — “We both will benefit from an open, secure, reliable Internet. Outright cyber-enabling theft that US companies are experiencing now must be viewed as out of bounds and needs to stop” — which means you can expect the Chinese to respond by saying basically the same thing. Also on the docket is North Korea, nuclear programs, trade, investment, climate change, the usual.

No group has claimed responsibility for the graffiti, but Initiatives for China sure seems proud of it. They write:

Citizen Power for China, also known as Initiatives for China, has recently launched a campaign, code named the Sparrow Initiative (2nd stage), to defend land rights of the Chinese people and obtain justice for the victims of  China’s violent dismantling and forced eviction activities. We believe everyone deserves to have a home, even a sparrow–. Any brutal action in taking that basic right away from the Chinese people is absolutely unacceptable.

The organization’s founder, Yang Jianli, told Voice of America, “People widely believe the graffiti on the Chinese embassy in the US is in support of the Sparrow Initiative.”

If you say so.

H/T:

@austinramzy Rather see US Embassy in Beijing get 拆'd. One of the ugliest, least-welcoming buildings in a city that sets a pretty high bar.

— Brendan O'Kane (@bokane) July 11, 2013

An incomplete statue of Soong Ching Ling, a.k.a. Madame Sun Yat-sen, which appeared in November 2011 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, was “quietly removed” recently, state media reported on July 4. How does one quietly remove an eight-story statue from a downtown area? Perhaps one should ask how one quietly commissions the building of an eight-story statue in the first place.

The controversy over the statue of Soong, who is also known as Madame Sun Yat-sen, first emerged in November 2011, when the Fujian-based Quanzhou Daily reported that the Henan Soong Ching Ling Foundation would spend 120 million yuan (US$19.58 million) on the construction of the statue to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution that toppled the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Hell, it doesn’t even look like locals knew what the statue was called, or if it was actually named after Soong Ching Ling, a vice president during the Republic of China era. Reports China Daily:

Workers at the Henan Soong Ching Ling Foundation told China News Service on Wednesday that the statue was one of the foundation’s programs and was named Daughter of the Yellow River, rather than the statue of Soong Ching Ling, after whom the foundation has been named.

The Soong Ching Ling Foundation is now under investigation. “Wasted money,” reads this Global Times headline – though it’s unknown how much money, exactly, was wasted on the statue itself, and how much was pocketed.

Web Urbanist called the statue one of the 9 worst in China. That sounds about right, if these pictures via Sina are any indication:

(H/T Alicia)

When you live on government land, what’s yours isn’t really, since it can be taken away in a whim. Of course, all land in China technically belongs to the government, so no one, in effect, can claim for him or herself that most basic of Maslow’s needs, shelter. Which is perhaps why the issue of demolition in China is such a tinderbox, ready to explode with cries about fairness, justice, and — forbid — a government’s scope of power.

With that in mind, Hug China relays this recent story from Tianmen, Hubei province:

Chinese Government officials allegedly enforced law violently in Tianmen city, Hubei province in central China, hiring tens of thugs to carry out forced demolition of local villager’ house and beat any trying to prevent them from doing so with bricks and sticks.

One microblogger’s response:

“If you have never met bandits and would like to know how they look like, please rush to watch how the Tianmen city planning bureau officials in Hubei province violently enforced law. There is only something you have not imagined but nothing they dare not do. You can see sticks and clubs were flying,  bricks and stones were raining. And cars were smashed, residents were beaten wherever they went.” Chinese Weibo microblogger @杜楠爆料 wrote on June 1, 2013.

It’s all too easily imaginable, alas. We’ve seen it before. Again and again. And we’ll see it again, likely sooner than later, until someone in a position of authority decides that a few extra bucks in an official or real estate mogul’s pockets isn’t worth this social turmoil.

Are they government officials or actually hired mafia thugs?… (Hug China)

Chengguan are not technically police officers, but out in the streets, their word is law. Today, we got a sobering reminder of that in Beijing. As reported by That’s Beijing, “around 30 to 50 chengguan, along with 20 xieguan officers (‘associate management,’ a force subordinate to chengguan – essentially, hired muscle) blocked off Xuezuo Hutong behind Zhangzizhonglu subway station, allowing the crews to dismantle six apartments nearing completion, claiming their records indicated the two-storey structures were illegal.” Who or what gave these chengguan the authority to do such a thing, when the residents of the apartments claimed they had the proper documents?

Please, step into the rabbit hole…

When asked whether they were acting according to protocol and if residents have legal channels of recourse, chengguan officer 0212180 said: “They have papers, but that doesn’t mean they’re real. There’s a lot of agencies that provide false documentation – and even if they have real documents, it doesn’t mean they [the documents] were processed legally.”

Got that? You can have papers, but that doesn’t mean anything. And even if your papers did mean something — are “real,” i.e. stamped, sealed, maybe even signed – it still doesn’t mean anything, because “it doesn’t mean they were processed legally.” There it is, rule of law in China, summarized in one quote. It’s only too perfect that it came from the mouth of a chengguan — these fellas.

Labor Day Proves Demolition Day As Thugs Tear Down ‘Legal’ Homes In Beijing (That’s Beijing)

Found on Sina Weibo, the above picture supposedly depicts a thug beating a petitioner in broad daylight on the streets of Xi’an in Shaanxi province. The man on the left is a goon allegedly hired by a demolish-and-relocate (chai-qian) gang, perhaps a real estate company or a local official. (Think the government wouldn’t get involved? A group of officials was recently arrested for doing just such a thing.) The bloodied man, we’re told, was resisting chai-qian. If not an actual petitioner, he was at least enough of a pain in the rear to require a lesson in local village politics.

What we really want to turn your attention to, however, are the uniformed men standing and watching this beating. They appear to be, if anything, keeping bystanders out, so that the thug gets in as many free shots as he thinks necessary. Vile and dastardly, this. What can we say? It’s just chengguan being chengguan.

(H/T Will Crook)

In China, a country constantly in flux, demolition is a fact of fact. Developers and local officials are continually seeking the next fertile ground to seed their latest urban project, often an office building, mall, or condo. It has become all too easy for those of us without vested interests to ignore the buildings that stand on these lands cursed by requisition, even as they are branded, clear as a scarlet letter, with the character chai – 拆. On paper, this process of removing unwanted structures and the people who occupy them is called chai-qian – 拆迁, demolish-and-relocate — which can be contentious and even violent. In the end, however, the developers always win, no matter how stubborn the residents, how spirited the resistance, how sacred the current site, or how old the neighborhood.

It is, in a word, inevitable. And perhaps no type of construction knows the fate of inevitability better than the gingerbread house, which is built out of love and care, but invariably torn asunder by grubby hands and unceremoniously masticated by our rapacious desire for saccharin, life’s white lies.

The above image is via NPR’s Louisa Lim, who tweets: “Beijing gingerbread house succumbs to its inevitable fate.”

China’s most eye-catching tomb is finally scheduled for removal. First reported in Western media on December 6 by NBC News’s Photo Blog — which sadly didn’t use the term “nail grave,” so now it doesn’t show up on the first page of Google search results — the tomb in Taiyuan, Shanxi province belonged to a family that refused to relocate it for developers, as they were “waiting for an auspicious date to do so.”

NBC News reports that the developers, at one point, offered to pay 1 million yuan (nearly $160,000) to move the grave [Ed's note: see update, below]. When the owners still didn’t budge, they began construction around the isolated tomb, resulting in the striking pictures you see above and below — a burial mound 10 meters high. The term to describe these type of relocate-and-demolish holdovers is “nail house,” so netizens dubbed the gravesite the “nail grave.”

But alas, the auspicious date has apparently come. Via Sina:

The owner, Chang Jinzhu, and his family have reached a verbal agreement with local village committee and the construction consortium to remove the grave in this month and would receive 800 Yuan ($128) in compensation, , according to Cao Shuanquan, who is in charge of the land use in the village.

The grave is nearly 10 meters high and covers an area of 10 sq. m, standing on the green between two high-rise buildings under construction, which has began for two years. The grave bears a resemblance to an islet isolated by the concrete forest that besieges it.

Some information is obviously missing here, as 800 yuan is a far cry from 1 million. We’ll sort it out for you. In the meantime, let’s pour one out for the awesome nail grave: as with the awesome nail house demolished last month in Wenlin, Zhejiang province — and the rest of us, really — it’ll soon bite the dust.

UPDATE, 12:08 pm: China’s 21st Century Business Herald reports that the developers originally offered 800 yuan per grave, and there were “more than 200 graves” on the site. 800 times 200 is 160,000 – yuan, not dollars. Perhaps this confused NBC News?

It’s not just them, though: I’m seeing National Geographic and The Sun citing the 160,000 dollars figure as well (or in The Sun’s case, “nearly £100,000″), without saying where they got the info. Tsk tsk, guys — still haven’t learned?

(H/T Alicia)

For the last three or more years, rumor’s swirled over “restoration” plans in the Drum and Bell (Gulou) neighborhood to create a large plaza or “Time Cultural City.” It looks like the local government and developers are finally going forward with it. Here’s AFP’s latest report on the subject, which actually gives a date:

Notices for the “destroy and evict” project are plastered throughout the quarter, dated Wednesday and saying the work was due to be completed by February 24.

Besides protecting the historic legacy of the capital, the project is also aimed at restoring and repairing old and dilapidated buildings, the notices said.

Compensation begins around 40,000 yuan per square meter, but can be negotiated. Between 130 and 500 homes will be destroyed.

Par for the course, people are happy about the compensation. People are not happy about the compensation.

“A lot of people are opposed to the campaign, 40,000 yuan per square metre is too cheap, especially with the price of housing in Beijing sky-rocketing,” said the manager of a coffee shop near the Drum Tower, who gave her surname only as Wang.

“People are already asking for 150,000 yuan per square metre,” she said.

Others said they were happy with the compensation.

“We took the money,” said Zhou Li, 51, who was to move out to the suburbs with his elderly parents this weekend after living most of his life near the Bell Tower.

China is a complicated country.

In 2010, the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center (CHP), which works to preserve historical neighborhoods around the city, reported that Gulou plans had been shelved.

“The halt buys us some time to really think about what’s best for both the residents and preserving history,” said Zhang Pei of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center.

We haven’t heard from them for a while. (We’ve reached out to them for comment and will update if we hear back.) In fact, the organization has gone off the grid recently; no tweet since February 6, nothing on Tumblr  or Flickr since last September, and a now-deleted Facebook page.

The Drum and Bell neighborhood has already undergone lots of changes, of course. The space between the two towers used to be a gathering place for locals who played shuttlecock or badminton. These days, it’s a parking lot, mostly for tour buses. It’ll bring more revenue into the district, which will (surely, ahem) be used in public works projects for the greater good. All it costs is a bit of history.

Ogle Earth has provided us a unique chronology of some of China’s more famous nail houses, and presented them “in geospatial context.” Writes Stefan Geens:

Every so often, the master plans of developers don’t align with those of an existing home owner. The negotiations, coaxing and intimidation that follow can reach absurd levels, while surrounding buildings and utilities are removed. The remaining “nail house” (钉子户, dīngzi hù) fittingly reifies the defiance of its owner, but in the end, the lone holdout almost never proves a match against the unstoppable forces of dialectical materialism.

Geens went the extra step to hunt down images from Google Earth so that you see nail houses in context. Here’s his KML file for download, which you can open in Google Earth.

Nail houses captivate us — and not just because of the good visuals or the underdog empathies they arouse. They are a rip in the space-time continuum to a counterfactual world, where China’s vernacular architecture is ceded a place. For as long as they hold out, nail houses are waypoints to the past, standing askance against the all-too straight lines of futurism with Chinese characteristics.

Examples:

Chongqing 2007

Guangzhou 2007

The most recent nail house to garner national press, of course, was demolished.

(H/T Mara Hvistendahl)

Show’s over, folks. The “Most Awesome Nail House” in Wenlin, Zhejiang province — a three-story residence standing in the middle of a highway near a railway station — has been demolished after the owner, 67-year-old Luo Baogen, signed an agreement with property developers. “Well, I am willing to relocate,” Luo said. The terms of the relocation agreement haven’t been disclosed.

And so it is, another one bites the dust. With all the national and international media attention the Most Awesome Nail House had received the place probably could have become a tourist attraction, or at the least, a restaurant. But nope — dust, as of this morning. Soon it will be paved over, and forgotten.

UPDATE, 12/2, 3:14 pm (4:20 pm: swapped Daily Mail link to those who did actual reporting): Via Xinhua:

Luo, 67, and his wife moved away from the lone house before dawn to the relocation site, assisted by relatives.

According to the demolition agreement, the government will offer 260,000 yuan (41,782 U.S. dollars) and an area of ground for a new house.

…”It was never a final solution for us to live in a lone house in the middle of the road. After the government’s explanations, I finally decided to move,” said Luo.

And AP:

Village chief Chen said Luo was tired of all the media attention and voluntarily consented to the deal. “Luo Baogen received dozens of people from the media every day and his house stands in the center of the road. So he decided to demolish the house,” Chen said.

Authorities commonly pressure residents to agree to make way for development with sometimes extreme measures, such as cutting off utilities or moving in to demolish when residents are out for the day. In Luo’s case, however, he had told local reporters last week his electricity and water were still flowing.