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 补习班号外三：已报名同学请进 |
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补习班号外三：已报名同学请进 -- 牛仔 - (1824 Byte) 2004-2-26 周四, 20:24 (2445 reads) |
s3mao
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加入时间: 2004/02/25
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作者：s3mao 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
BEIJING -- On May 23 of last year, police forced Ye Guozhu and his family, including his elderly parents, wife, son and younger brother, to stand inside a cordon and watch as a construction crew demolished their homes. The Ye family's experience is hardly unusual in today's China -- over the past 13 years the authorities have evicted more than 1.5 million people in this city alone, and local governments around the country are doing the same. More noteworthy has been Mr. Ye's reaction.
While most Chinese who are forcibly relocated by local authorities accept the meager compensation on offer and move on, Mr. Ye has become one of a small but growing band of protesters and activists with the temerity to demand that the government respect private property rights. For that he has been arrested and detained several times, and others like him have been beaten and sentenced to prison terms. But the mounting dissatisfaction he represents is beginning to have an effect on the Beijing government.
Protection of property rights has become a hot topic within China's government and in the media. In March the national legislature is due to amend the country's still explicitly socialist constitution to raise the status of private property closer to the level of communal assets. But this remains a symbolic gesture, since the courts lack the power of judicial review to overturn lower level laws and regulations when they violate the constitution.
So the real struggle is over the behavior of local officials, who have effectively become a law unto themselves. They are stretching the powers of China's land use laws, which allow forced evictions if they are "in the public interest" and if adequate compensation is given, in order to clear land cheaply for commercial developers. Pressure to stop these abuses is starting to come from below, as ordinary Chinese develop an understanding of the legal rights they are supposed to enjoy and try to make them real.
People like Mr. Ye, who was evicted on just two months' notice, have many grievances, but the biggest is inadequate compensation. The district government offered the Ye family only $63,400 for their 108 square meters of single-story living space within Beijing's second ring road. That is not only below the market value of land in such a central location, it isn't enough for them to buy comparable homes unless they move far out into the suburbs.
Such moves often destroy families' livelihoods and impose heavy new burdens. For instance, Mr. Ye used to run a small restaurant, but it too was demolished three years ago. After that he and his brother scraped by, finding odd jobs and running a stand selling lamb kebabs. Many low-income workers forced to move to the suburbs can't find new jobs there, and can't afford to commute into the city. Their children also lose free access to the better schools in the downtown.
It's no wonder then that after Mr. Ye was detained on China's National Day last October, his brother Ye Guoqiang was so desperate he tried to kill himself by jumping into the moat near the portrait of Mao Zedong overlooking Tiananmen Square. For the "crime" of choosing such a high-profile location for his attempted suicide, he is now serving two years in prison.
Instead of giving up hope, however, Ye Guozhu has become one hub in an informal network of the evicted, who are out protesting or putting up posters practically every day. In a modest apartment borrowed from a friend, he has piled one bed with photocopied literature about his and others' cases, and answers a collection of cell phones which periodically ring with the latest news of evictions and protests.
Mr. Ye offers new victims advice on how to protest and publicize their cases, and even though he can't offer any material help, his message is positive. As he tells one caller, "Let's not kill ourselves. At least let's make some contribution to our democracy and human rights. Why should we want to die? It's the government and the eviction companies who have taken our property; they committed the crime not us. We haven't made any unreasonable demands, but the government has harmed us."
Beijing sowed the seeds of this more assertive mode of thinking when it undertook housing reform a few years ago. The authorities encouraged ordinary Chinese to buy their homes from the state or their work unit at preferential prices, and residents were led to believe they had also obtained the right to use the land those homes sat on. As China's cities expanded and the real estate market boomed, some of the poorest members of society suddenly found themselves in control of valuable land.
But in a country where the legal system is still at a primitive stage of development, property rights which exist on paper are quickly trumped by political power. Well-connected property developers obtain permission to redevelop an area through a closed process, and use real estate appraisal companies allied with the local government to determine the level of compensation before residents even know what's happening. Then the developers hire "eviction companies," again connected with the local government, to handle the dirty work of moving out the old residents -- a job that sometimes includes bringing in "cudgel brigades" of thugs to hammer down the "nail households" who refuse to go quietly.
According to Qin Bing, a lawyer who works on the forced eviction issue, property developers putting up residential developments in central Beijing typically keep 40% or more of their revenue as profit. The government's coercive power allows them to buy old, low-rise homes for about $725 per square meter, and sell the high-rise apartments they build at the market price of $1,200 per square meter.
Cai Dingjian, a constitutional scholar at Peking University, foresees that the widespread nature of the forced eviction phenomenon, which in slightly different form is also taking place in the countryside, could prove a catalyst for demands for greater civil rights. "This conflict between property rights and government interests will be particularly sharp, even more sharp than past conflicts like the laid-off workers from the state-owned enterprises," he warns.
The newly unemployed face great hardship, but they generally understand that in an increasingly market-oriented economy, money-losing companies can't go on providing lifetime employment and cradle-to-grave benefits. But the government can offer the victims of forced eviction no such justification for taking away their privately owned homes without adequate compensation.
Mr. Cai puts the issue in the context of several other phenomena last year showing the spread of rights consciousness and activism. Debate over excessive police powers raged after a young man was beaten to death in police custody in Guangzhou, leading to changes in regulations governing detention. An entrepreneur in Hubei arrested on trumped-up charges was released after public opinion rallied behind him. Chinese who can't find jobs because they carry the hepatitis B virus recently petitioned the national legislature to end such discrimination. And in a few places, when independent candidates tried to run for election to local legislatures that have usually been reserved for those hand-picked by the Communist Party, the authorities allowed them to run and even take office.
The government is also giving ground modestly over forced evictions in order to assuage public anger. Last year central and local authorities began to clamp down on the "savage" methods used by some companies to force residents out of their homes. Then the central government issued a policy document in January calling for fairer and more transparent procedures to set the level of compensation. New regulations will supposedly put these changes into effect as of March 1.
However, there is good reason to be skeptical that Beijing will solve this particular problem so easily. The laws allowing forced eviction remain in force, and as long as there are big profits to be made in real estate, developers will keep the process going by funneling funds into officials' pockets. Local leaders also have an incentive to encourage fast redevelopment at the expense of the poor because new building and investment enhance their prestige and win them promotion. Since governments are clearing many areas for their own infrastructure projects, they want to keep compensation levels low to protect their own budgets. Back in 2001 Beijing trumpeted new regulations to make the compensation process fairer, but instead the abuses just got worse.
Nevertheless, several lawyers who work on this issue express cautious optimism that procedures will become more transparent and institutionalized, and compensation levels will improve, even though the fundamental injustice of evictions will continue. This is because, as Gao Zhicheng, a prominent lawyer who defends victims pro bono, says, while most Chinese accept their fate numbly in order to remain safe, the sense of injustice compels him and others to accept the risk of resisting.
Recent cases have shown that it is possible for public opinion to force China's Communist Party to cede greater civil rights. True, these advances have been very modest, and there is no question of the Party ceding its monopoly on power. Yet they do represent the thin end of a wedge. Eventually Beijing may find that accepting an independent judiciary and wider participation in government is the only ways to resolve conflicts that threaten to upset social stability.
Unlike in the 1980s, when demands for political reform were very abstract and led by the intellectual elite within and outside the Party, this time the and the demands are specific and the impetus for change is coming directly from the people. Are the Chinese finally going to stand up for their rights? If the efforts of activists, lawyers and legal scholars are any indication, that day is finally approaching.
作者：s3mao 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 补习班号外三：已报名同学请进 -- 牛仔 - (1824 Byte) 2004-2-26 周四, 20:24 (2445 reads) - Test 2: China's Rising Rights Consciousness -- s3mao - (10030 Byte) 2004-2-26 周四, 21:11 (479 reads)
- We got it! -- 牛仔 - (92 Byte) 2004-2-27 周五, 02:00 (426 reads)
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