Mutant Palm

While there is much discussion of the Internet campaign surrounding the Nail House and the triumph of individual property rights over the entrenched interests of the state and developers, there has been no coverage in the major media about another Internet campaign underway to protect an entire city from the same writ on a much larger scale. Over the past week I was on holiday as my parents were visiting. Before bringing them to Quanzhou, where I currently live, we spent the weekend in neighboring Xiamen on the island of Gulangyu. A former colonial concession, Gulangyu is a small picturesque island with no cars, motorcycles or scooters, and is relatively unspoiled despite the massive statue of Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) and the organized tours that arrive en masse promptly at 8 am. There is a large aviary, pleasant beaches and a fair amount of greenery. Little did I know that not 7 km away there is a factory beginning to pump out 800,000 tons of the toxic chemical para-xylene (Chinese name 1，4-二甲苯 ).

As John Kennedy at GVO reports, the plant in Haicang just west of Xiamen Island and Gulangyu was originally to meant to be at least 7 km from the city center, though development in the Haicang district has placed schools and residences much closer. No fewer than 105 national CPPCC members have opposed the plant, led by the former president of the Beijing Aeronautics and Astronautic University, a Xiamen University chemistry professor and others. The State Environmental Protection Administration said their hands are tied as the project is invested by the National Development and Reform Commission. PX, the toxic chemical, is a key component in many industrial processes, not least of which are polyester manufacturing and Xiamen’s Eleventh Five Year Plan. Nearby is the Xiamen Rare Marine Species Wildlife Reserve, which is partly for the endangered Chinese white dolphin.

Southern Metropolitan Daily once again is out in front as columnist Lian Yue posts here and here about the problem. A blog has been started devoted to spreading the word called HaicangPX, and Baidu gives about 80,000 hits to “px 厦门”, while Baidu news returns 924. I, for my part, have passed the word to what few influential people I know in Quanzhou, who are passing the word to others, since Quanzhou is quite close and very economically close to Xiamen. Whether anything will be done is another matter, but from what I can tell the subject has not been brought up on any Fujian news websites, and my usually well-informed friends never heard about this.

ESWN points out an article in FEER entitled “Have China Scholars All Been Bought?”. As someone who has actually held the title “independent scholar”, which is another term for unemployed, I can safely say no one has bought me off yet. Carsten A. Holz seems to me a bit fed up, listing numerous grievances about the state of China research. Some of them are issues I feel are not as neglected as Dr. Holz believes. But one part stuck with me about the Communist Party:

Our use of language to conform to the image the Party wishes to project is pervasive. Would the description “a secret society characterized by an attitude of popular hostility to law and government” not properly describe the secrecy of the Party’s operations, its supremacy above the law and its total control of government? In Webster’s New World College Dictionary, this is the definition of “mafia.”

This part reminded me of something a Singaporean Chinese friend of mine once told me in China. He had once been on a flight sitting next to a gentleman who turned out to be Sicilian. Passing the time in conversation, they compared their respective cultures positions on family, elders, honor and business. They found many similarities, my friend said. “The Godfather, mate,” he said, having spent time in Australia, “Watch the Godfather and you’ll know all you need to know to understand China”.

The other thing it reminds me of, curiously enough, is the following exchange in the film The Good Shepherd, between Matt Damon’s Edward Wilson, a Skull & Bones alumni and CIA counter-intelligence chief, and Joe Pesci’s Joseph Palmi, mafia boss, who asks about Damon’s people, referring to WASPs:

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the chuch; the Irish they have the homeland, jews their tradition; even the niggas, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America, and the rest of you are just visiting.

Wherein I consider Howard French’s opinion piece on the Nail House, entitled “A Couple’s Small Victory a Big Step for China”. This is a follow-up to the previous post on the Nail House case.

I don’t mean to pick on Howard French. OK, maybe I do. But I feel his piece fits many things I wish to discuss about American coverage on China into a neat little package. The nut of his opinion piece, which begins rather breathlessly and then tells us “giddiness should be resisted”, is this:

China is unlikely to be delivered unto a new era by a Gorbachev-like figure. Indeed, since the Soviet meltdown, the leadership has policed itself vigilantly to prevent such a turn and, under President Hu Jintao, has, if anything, grown more conservative.

It seems unlikely to be delivered by China’s intellectuals, either. The country’s scholarly class is for the most part too cowed and too cosseted, too thoroughly co-opted by the system and by the country’s new affluence to make many waves.

Great change won’t come from the country’s peasants, either, even if they have been the locus of mounting effervescence in recent years.

Change, when it comes and whatever form it takes, will be propelled by the fast-rising middle class, by savvy and articulate people who are mindful of their rights, rooted first in property but extending almost seamlessly to questions of speech, of movement and of association.

French believes that Wu Ping and her husband Yang Wu are the harbingers of such change, bold pioneers of a coming new era. I don’t deny that the Nail House tenants were savvy, or that Hu Jintao is not going to be Gorby, or that Chinese scholars nor peasants have not produced some revolutionary movement. There are three assumptions embedded in this article that I’m not so sure about.

1. That this was a confrontation between “the people” and “the state”. As French puts it, on the surface this appears to be “two simple citizens against a mighty and murky alliance of an authoritarian state and big development money”. He then says in reality “in a society where people have been effectively atomized … they also figured out how to glue millions of discrete individuals together in sympathy for a cause not directed from above.” So then we are to understand this was a popular movement against the state, not two lone individuals. But was it really against the state? Certainly the Chongqing officials/developers were cast as the opposition here, but Wu Ping and Yang Wu invoked the nation and the law as their protection. The national government was not the target here, but the local. And the national government is not, as many Americans believe, monolithic. CCTV interviewed Wu Ping just before the March 22nd deadline. Even the local government was not simply set against the tenants – after all, negotiations dragged out for three years before the story exploded in the media. While the developer no doubt played dirty tricks, some elements of the Chongqing government must have functioned to some degree in protecting the tenants, otherwise the house would have been long since demolished. But instead of portraying this as a tangled web of interests both within and without the local community, government, media and national goverment, French tells us a simplified David and Goliath tale, to the readers loss.
2. That there is a new era on the horizon. James Mann, in his book The China Fantasy, suggests that American perspectives on China have long been dominated by two competing visions of the future: The Soothing Scenario, a democratized China brought about by trade and globalization, and The Upheaval Scenario, in which China collapses due to any number of internal problems. Mann then posits a third scenario, in which China does neither, and more or less continues doing what it already does, namely be authoritarian, only richer. Mann is not the first to suggest this. French’s article seems to imply a bit of both of the first two scenarios, suggesting that trade and economic reform has created a middle class that will generate upheaval, forcing the government to adapt and perhaps even democratize or face a collapse. He ends his piece quoting Zhao Ziyang, who vanished from the leadership after supporting the students at Tiananmen, saying that the works of Mao would have to be relegated to a museum. But the underlying assumption is that there will be a “new era” at all.
3. That the new era, or two or three, didn’t already arrive long ago. The middle class in China, for several years now, have been “mindful of their rights” as French puts it. Freedom of speech, movement and association has grown tremendously particularly for those with money. Rather than perceiving this as a trend that started long ago, and with at least some awareness by the government of what they were inviting, if they are at all as smart as French says they are, French sees it as being on the horizon. There’s no consideration that these events actually exist along a continuum of gradual changes ever since Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour. Or that there are more recent antecedents to the Nail House story: The Huananxincheng Story a year earlier had much of the same criteria: local middle class man seeks to defend his rights, is beaten by local provincial authorities, and then CCTV makes it national, forcing the provincial authorities to address it. But sometimes I feel like many in America have “Tiananmen Fever” – as if the democratic revolution they saw on TV was put on pause, and they are waiting for someone to pick up the remote and press play again.

I wonder at the fact that I find points to agree with Lu Gaofeng’s China Youth Daily editorial, Media Overexcited in Nail House Coverage – I haven’t decided if Sina.com’s cash prizes for photos was a good idea or not – and Chinese blogger Xiaowu’s commentary, in which he says:

So I have argued that what really happened is not the same as the audience watched or read from the media. It is not about a tough resident fighting against government’s violence and power. It is not an incident of human rights or protecting civil rights. It is definitely not an evidence to show that “wind may come in, rain may come in, but the king may not… …” is true in China. There is a logic widely known operating. The local government did not take away this house immediately because some stronger forces working behind. From the TV news report, the woman of the office of demolition was not as arrogant and aggressive as the victim. There are some reasons for it. Imagining the victim as a heroine of human rights is only a wishful thinking of ordinary people. … …

UPDATE: Philip Bowring in the Asia Sentinel has a relevant article entitled “China’s Middle Class: Not What You Think It Is”, in which he points to the work of UBS economist Jonathan Anderson who crunches the number and believes that the number of Chinese citizens that could arguably be urban middle class, that is those who can afford “a mortgaged apartment, a car, a computer, the occasional karaoke visit”, comes out to 70 million. If that’s the case, it seems difficult to believe they will be at the forefront of radical change, and as James Mann suggests, they may actually be the most likely to be for the status quo.

I’ve been more or less out of commission for the past few weeks, as the real world has been keeping me busy. So I missed the Coolest Nailhouse Spectacular that went on in the China blogosphere. But it’s interesting to see how the story evolved from a eye-catching photo in the Oddly Enough section to a narrative about people power, the path from a photo on a Chinese BBS to the International Herald Tribune. What follows is an attempt to piece together an incomplete sketch of how the narrative evolved.

The photo of the nailhouse first appeared, according to Southern Metropolitan Daily, on February 26th (see Peering into the Interior for the translation, March 8th). A picture is apparently worth much more than a thousand words, since it went viral in China and generated far more comments and reposts than a thousand, to the point where SMD picked it up. Then Ananova had it, which got picked up by BoingBoing on March 12th (h/t UGOTrade). That got things rolling in the English speaking Internetz. The Southern Metropolitan Daily had this to say about the holdouts who refused to let a major developer run them out of their house without proper compensation:

“The leaser wanted 200,000,000RMB from the developer or else he wouldn’t move. His family had some background and connections, so the developer didn’t dare take action.”

This, it would turn out, wasn’t true. At the time, from SMD’s sample quotes from the forums, not many people online did either. But the picture was super cool and grabbed eyeballs, all in the shadow of China’s property reform law. That, and China’s own version of eminent domain was a long simmering issue across the nation.

So what happens next? Well, over the next week, journalists flocked to Chongqing and the boards buzzed. The deadline was March 22nd for demolition, creating the perfect air of suspense for “breaking news” coverage. Rumors flew about: Wu Ping and her husband Yang Wu, the tenants, had mafia connections; they wanted 20 million, 4 million, an apartment. Wu Ping herself even confused things; according to Southern Weekend (translation @ ESWN), she claimed her father was a prosecutor and her parents both cadres in the Communist Party. Yet files the paper obtained indicate her father was a Kuomintang soldier and an animal breeder, the former being a bad start to Party membership and the latter being, well, not a prosecutor. Meanwhile, the Internet started cranking out over-the-top deifying Photoshop work of Yang Wu, who was all too made-for-Chinese-media as a former Kung Fu champion defiantly sneaking into the Nail House on the last day before demolition to wave the Chinese flag from the roof, neatly wrapping up nationalism, populism and something out of a Jet Li movie all in one.

Liberte, Fraternite and Insensibility?

“Nail House Thought Propaganda Force” – hmmm.

Wu Ping even started, for only one post, a Nail House blog the day of the deadline. Two days later, the State Council Information Office put a blackout on Nail House coverage. This was, of course, after Sina.com had been offering cash for photos and videos, MOP.com had real time monitoring, and didn’t stop the subsequent production of a music video (see CDTs’ Nail House coverage), not to mention Wu Ping getting interviewed on the CCTV program Legal Society (see Peering into the Interior again). Neither did it stop the adventurous Zola from becoming what some have dubbed China’s first citizen journalist. Less than four days later, the ban was lifted, presumably after the SCIO realized they weren’t accomplishing anything and were even more ham-fisted than they usually are.

The Nail House wasn’t demolished on the deadline. In fact, it was demolished nearly two weeks later, after the developers and the tenants reached a compromise. The compromise was this (ESWN):

The Settlement Terms for the Chongqing Nail House

According to the Jiulongpo People’s Court, the two-storey building was valuated at 2.47 million RMB while the real estate developer offered a replacement shop/home building valuated at 3.06 RMB; as a result, the house owners Yang/Wu will pay back the difference of 590,000 RMB to the developer.

Furthermore, the real estate develop will pay compensation to the amount of 900,000 RMB for business losses plus 105,000 RMB for property damage and moving expenses. This is coming down from the 5 million plus RMB originally demanded by Yang/Wu.

Did the tenants win what they were after? The Nail House battle didn’t start in February 2007 – it started three years earlier, and that was eleven years after the original developer gave the area residents notice of a land requisition. That developer, Chongqing Nanlong, didn’t have the cash to do anything in 1993 until it partnered with Chongqing Zhengsheng, a state-owned company whose leaders have ties to the local government and local Communist Party. Then, in 2004, residents were offered what most thought was a bad deal, and everybody else took it. Under existing regulations, two forms of compensation could be offered: property of equivalent value in the new development, or cash. Wu Ping and her husband fought for the first option, and for a fair reckoning of the Nail House’s value, a property that was ““First floor for first floor, second floor for second floor. Same direction. Either left or right is okay”, plus compensation for lost business from 1993 to 2006 totalling 5,147,400 RMB. With a property value estimate of 2,470,000 RMB, this put it at nearly 8 million RMB altogether. The courts pushed back the demolition date three times, and there were three negotiations between September 14, 2006 and February 9, 2007. By the third negotiation, the developer had offered a house more or less meeting Wu Ping’s criteria (two floors, on the street, same square area), plus monetary compensation which matched the 700,000 RMB Wu Ping would pay to meet the value of the new property. This is a deal that would net Wu and Yang roughly a 3.2 million yuan property in the location they wanted.

Then another issue cropped up: chops. Wu Ping insisted that Nanlong, the original company that acquired the development rights, place its seal on the agreement. She refused the Zhengsheng seal saying it would not stand up as evidence in court if they tried to pull a fast one on her. She also refused to sign when Nanlong’s legal rep sent his daughter to collect the seal “You can get a seal made anywhere in the street. Why should I believe that this is authentic?”

With the final settlement, questions remain. In the end they are walking away with the property from the February 9th settlement, more or less, and half a million in cash. Was the seal argument just a bargaining tactic to squeeze that little bit more? Was the three year stalemate before the hullabaloo due more to Wu Ping’s apparent savvy, or the Chongqing government’s patience? Do we consider it a win if Wu Ping and Yang Wu haven’t really received compensation for lost business, or being shut out of their own property by the developers? What about the largest issue of collusion between the state and developers? And when 1 out of 280 households chooses to play hardball, can anyone really say there’s a large move towards asserting legal rights? While this has been tied to the new property law in several publications, is it the law, or the media attention drawn to the Nail House by the serendipitous coincidence that the demolition deadline came on the heels of the NPC sessions? As one Chinese commenter pointed out:

China has never had a lack of laws, what it lacks is enforcement. If people are not equal before the law, how effective can this kind of law be?!

Were the laws properly followed in the Nail House case? If Wu Ping truly did use “connections” to simply get access to the courthouse and other government buildings, and needed it, what sort of enforcement could there be, and how could this case possibly increase the possibility of such enforcement? If anything, one could argue the new property law becomes simply one more decree from Beijing for local oligarchs to ignore. After all, it appears all of them in Chongqing kept there jobs in this “successful resolution”.

I said I’d get to the International Herald Tribune. In my next post, I want to look at Howard French’s opinion piece on the Nail House in the context of what I’ve cobbled together here, and how the story reaches American ears.

Via Warren Ellis, an Ananova article on a 13 mile long Dragon being built in Xinzheng, Henan.
Chinese articles here and here.