china — Journalism — In the footsteps of an Itinerant Child

Four days ago this area had been a bustling and vibrant community. Within an hour of taking this image I would be in the hands of the Chinese police, struggling to keep my camera in my hands and the rest of me out of their van.

I had wandered through the tight alleys and courtyards of the Hutong style homes caught in their overlapping sounds and smells. It was a small area tucked in between a new overpass and supermarket on two sides and railway lines on the other. It was a working class neighbourhood, it was late afternoon and the population was exclusively elderly and children, all of the mothers and fathers away. Most of the men who would return later that evening in their blue and orange uniforms of the railway station and freight yards, and fill the tables that would appear on the wider streets, surrounding the various street food vendors as they work from portable kitchens either built into or towed by their bikes. There is a wholesale fruit and vegetable market nearby which attracts the farmers from the outlying villages who, at the weekend, will drive slowly through selling the last of their wares at a cheap rate in this and neighboring districts. In a few places they stop and drop off bigger bags at one house. “That lady will take it to the old and the sick, those who do not have children to care for them.” One of the street vendors explained.

Hutongs had been the predominant form of housing in China for centuries, if not millennia, and were prevalent in every major conurbation. One Hutong in Beijing, Sanmiao Jie, is claimed to be over 900 years old. Though surviving older hutongs are extremely rare, the majority date from the first half of the 20th century. As the Qing Court and its bureaucracy disintegrated the previously carefully planned hutongs began to spread rapidly and haphazardly. The following governments of Sun Yat Sen or Chiang Kai Shek made no attempts to monitor or regulate the situation or the materials being used which meant large portions of this new housing was sub-standard.

The exceptions were the foreign controlled treaty ports and cities such as this one. The majority of Jinan and Shandong’s infrastructure and industry was built by the Germans in the years before the First World War. They built railways, steel foundries, coal mines and harbours, all to their stereotypical high standards and though they were very much second class citizens under an unjust system, the Chinese workers here and in other European controlled areas earned more and lived better than all other parts of the country.

I had come back for greasy potato fritters and cheap beer served in plastic bags but all was but rubble. The open space at first seemed big then I remembered how it had sounded and it suddenly seemed such a small plot of land to have such a sense of community. I walked unsteadily over piles of red bricks and white plaster. There were belongings amongst the rubble, clothes, kitchen utensils, toys, a PLA dress uniform hat, some boxing gloves.

The destruction of the Hutongs has always been on the Communist Party’s agenda but the reasons have changed drastically. In the early years of the Party and Mao’s rule most of the demolitions were to directly improve conditions for the people. Under the supervision of Prime Minister Liu Shao Qi living areas were inspected and altered to whatever the local water supply, sewage system, or simple population density could support. It was the urban side of their crucial ‘land reform policy’ which prevented private ownership of land and began the party’s first major land grab. During the chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution things went in the opposite direction and families were heaped in to the hutongs, one per room. The residents had no choice over who would live with them and homes which previously held four or five now held up to 20. Many people ‘informed’ on their new neighbours as counter-revolutionaries for any perceived slight, such was their anger at the situation and the climate of terror was fuelled further. The urban version of the collectivism forced on the countryside. The hutongs began to fall as part of Mao’s ‘Campaign against the four olds’ and others to make way for industrial plants and factories in the heart of the cities to create what Mao called ‘a beautiful skyline of chimneys’.

The area looked deserted which is incredibly rare in China. There was no traffic on the road as there was no longer anything for it to take you to but sites like this were usually swarming with people. Usually migrant workers from the poorest parts of the country who work in shifts, day and night to break down the buildings and organize and clear the rubble. They wear no protective clothing, gloves, goggles or even boots. Their tools too are generally no more advanced than pickaxes and sledgehammers. Also missing are the small triangular flags or various colours, more commonly called bunting, which they use in China to demarcate dangerous construction sites.

The largest and most insidious land grabs have happened since 2006. There was a sea-change inside the Communist Party when the announcement came of the 2008 Olympics. They haggled and bartered to have the start date moved to the 8th August 2008 as this date 8-8-8 is especially auspicious in Chinese culture with 8 meaning ‘prosperity’ accentuated to an unprecedented degree by the alignment of the day, month and year.

I saw a man squatting in the rubble nearby. “Hello.” I called.

His flinch was visible from my ten feet away but he relaxed for a moment when he saw my foreign face. Then he sprang into life. I had been walking towards him and was only a foot away now. His voice was fast and frantic and thick with the local dialect. I tried to tell him I couldn’t understand but he cut me off pushing my right hand with my camera in it up to my face. “Zhe ge! Zhe ge! Zhe ge!” (This! This! This!) He shouted, pointing around. I started taking pictures and he began scrabbling in the rubble looking for something. He came up a few moments later with a piece of chalk and wrote on the wall:

“Si you cai chan, shou fa lu bao hu; zheng fu bu men bu gu min heng, qiang xing chai qian.”

“Private properties are protected by law; the government disregards the people’s will, tears down their houses and forces them to move.”

The man was middle aged yet it has hard to tell exactly. His skin was dark and his hands and grip were like stone, so it is fair to guess that he worked outside. His eyes were doing cartwheels in his head and then suddenly he seemed to gain focus. “My home,” he said in slow, heavily accented English. “Wo xie, ni zha xiang, zai zhao ren fan yi. Kuai dian er.” (I’ll write it down, you take pictures and find someone to translate later. Hurry up!) He spoke tersely and with deliberate tones to make it easy for me. I took pictures of places I recognised. The house with the tree in the courtyard, the house that was cooking spicy soup, the dress shop with its naked mannequins.

The Chinese people can never legally own their own home or property. The structure of the property law in China has at its core State ownership of all land within the country. Leases are then taken on the property, the maximum duration of which is 70 years at this time the land reverts back to the government. This has denied people one of the most basic forms of human security: The knowledge that you and your family will always have a home.

He dashed up to me again, climbing on his bike as he spoke. Three large, dusty carrier bags were now tied to his bike rack with string. I held out my hand to offer a handshake. “Ni sha a?” (Are you stupid?) He slapped my hand away and pointing up to nearby flats said: “Yao shi you ren kan jian le, ken ding hui da 110. Zou! Kuai! Ben si le!” (If someone saw, he’ll definitely call the police. Go! Fast! Uh, deathly stupid!)

Before the Communist government took over in 1949 the Chinese had been able to own property and pass it down in the family, a tradition in keeping with Confucianism’s fealty. The government would go on to first seize any property owned by landlords, then the bourgeoisie (merchants and intelligentsia) then peasants through collectivization and finally industrialists and business owners who were seen to be ‘taking the capitalist road’. By the end of Mao’s reign of terror the country had become 90% agrarian and most people lived at a standard last seen in the west at the end of the 18th century.

He pedaled off and I started walking. I switched the memory card in my camera and it went with the note into my pants.

I heard the van before I saw it, heard the engine driving fast and closing on the blind corner which was my only safety. It was rubble and open space all around but there was a structure off to the edge still standing, at least three walls were, and I made for it. As I crossed the threshold it became apparent why this building hadn’t been pulled down too. It had been used as a toilet by the workers. The evidence was everywhere. The van screeched to a halt and I made a valiant effort of walking casually off. Sadly the van simply rolled slowly alongside me and a fat sweating man in the passenger seat chirpily asked: “Ni qu na er?” (Where are you going?) They pulled slightly ahead of me, the door opened blocking my path and that was that.

There were two police men in the van. The passenger who had spoken to me stood, bulkily smiling while the driver climbed out of the otherside. He was a small, skinny man who walked with his head and shoulders thrust forward and the look of an angry teenager on his face. Immediately he began shouting and pointing his finger at me. I raised an eyebrow to the fatter one.

“Hui shuo zhong wen ma?” (Do you speak Chinese?) He asked.

“Yi dian er,” (A bit) I replied, “qing shuo man yi dian er.” (but please speak slowly.)

“Gan ma ne?” (What are you doing?)

“Zou yi zou, kan yi kan.Wo gang lai, guang yi guang.” (Walky walk, looky look. I am new here so I like to wander.)

“Ni wei shen me zhao xiang?” (Why did you take pictures of this?) He extended his arm to the rubble. The other man walked away from us.

“Jiu kan yi kan.” (I didn’t, just looky look.)

“You ren kan jian ni le! Na ge ren gen ni shuo shen me le?” (You were seen. What did the man tell you?)

“Ta shuo jinanhua. Wo ting bu dong. Wo jue de ta hen sheng qi. Ta chao wo han.” (He spoke Jinanhua (local dialect). I couldn’t understand him. I think he was angry. He shouted at me.”

The other man called over from the ruins, he had clearly found the chalk message.

There was a spell of silence. The fat man said something I didn’t understand. “Xiao xin, che”. (Caution, cars) He stated simply, though I had seen no other traffic all afternoon. The skinny man was standing by an old shop front. It had no first floor but a metal roller door was still in place. He beckoned us over. “Re si le,” (Hot as death) said the fat man. “Jin lai.” (Inside)

“No.” The words came out strangely, I was clearly more scared than I’d realized. I squeezed my camera to stop my hands from shaking. The fat man was grinning at me. I said it again, this time it came out like a bark. “No!”

There was a pause. “Jin lai!” (Come on!) He said taking hold of my arm. His grip was spongey and I was easily able to twist my wrist and push him away.

“No!” I barked again.

“Xiang ji gei wo!” (Camera, give me!)

I held raised it slightly and brought up the image review screen for him to see. He wrapped a sweaty hand around it but the strap was wound four times about my wrist so again I broke his grip. His hand had left a damp outline on the black plastic.

I was then suddenly off balance. The skinny man had come up behind me and was trying to pull me by my rucksack. I skipped backwards, removing the resistance and causing him to stumble.

“Hu zhao na lai!” (Passport, here!) Said the fat man.

“No.”

The skinny one was behind me again and he plucked my notebook from my back pocket and tossed it to the fatman. He opened it and dropped it in the dust at his feet. “You qian ma? Fa kuan.” (How much money do you have? There is a fine.)

“Mei you.” (None.)

“Hahaha… shang che.” (Get in the van.)

“No.”

“Dao na ge lou li qu.” (Get in the building.)

“No.”

They had gradually worked me back to the edge of the rubble and off the road. I was in trouble. The skinny man was grabbing at my bag, the fat one at my camera. Somehow the skinny one managed to retrieve my phone from my pocket and deftly popped the back off and battery out before dropping it too.

The skinny man was shouting again, his finger jabbing at my chest. His words were fast and spat at me. The only ones I recognized were curses. The fat one just laughed. “Xiang ji, ding fa kuan!” (Camera, is the fine!)

None of us heard the car pull up but we heard the door slam. Everything stopped. The fat man suddenly looked serious, the skinny man physically jumped and I took the chance to move out into the road again. The car was an old Volkswagen Jetta bearing the markings of the City Administrators, and arm of the Ministry of Public Security. Two people had got out, a fat old man with dyed hair and a shiny suit and a tiny woman in the uniform of the Public Security Bureau.

“Why are you giving the officers trouble?” She asked in heavily accented but perfect English.

“I’m not; they’re trying to take my camera as a fine.”

“Such serious allegations. I’m sure you are mistaken it is a misunderstanding caused by you, I’m sure.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was just walking.”

The skinny man spoke up excitedly, clearly talking about the chalk message. “Let our colleague see your pictures please.”

I show the fat man the images on my camera but I haven’t used the other memory card for a long time and the images of a snowbound England seem incongruous in the Chinese heat. Regardless, the fat man simply shakes his head and shrugs after seeing them.

“This is not right, what you are doing. Who was the man you spoke to?”

“I don’t know I couldn’t understand him. He was angry anyway.”

“What did he give you? What did he tell you?”

“Nothing, seriously.”

“Would you empty your pockets and bag please?”

“No.”

“Pardon? You are causing troubles here!”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “Don’t take photographs of private or public property; this is against the law. Take pictures only of the official scenic spots. Don’t walk around places like this, it is none of your business. Some people spread rumors and say there’s a problem. They are seeking to cause problems and you must stay away from them. Don’t listen to those unharmonious people.”

She went on; “Don’t try to embarrass us. Many foreigners cannot understand the situations in China. China has a long unique history. You don’t understand the Chinese and you may have a wrong idea about the situation. Listen to what I say. China is developing very fast and we are solving all the problems ourselves. Everything is fine. Now give you passport and visa details to Mr. Wu. Apologise to our colleagues for your allegations, and don’t commit such acts again.

The big man in the suit had finished copying the details from my passport and visa and was walking back to the car. He handed it to the woman. “We will remember you, Mr…” There was a pause as she squinted at my name, “err Michael.”

Without another word they got in their respective vehicles and disappeared. I collected my things from the dirt and adjusted the note and memory card in my pants, faintly worrying about papercuts. I turned too and walked away on shaking legs.

The note read: “The government forces us to move within two weeks, many people are unwilling to move because they take away our homes but the money they give us is not enough to buy a new one at all, so we have to get a mortgage. Some people already have difficulties, and if you cannot pay the mortgage you have nowhere to live, so we don’t want to move. Then the government sends thugs to beat up people and smash their things.”

Mao learned quickly from the lessons of Stalin. It was imperative for both of these men to move away from Marxism-Leninism as swiftly as possible. Under the ideology upon which the PRC is founded after a successful ‘proletariat revolution’ and a brief ‘dictatorship of the people’ another ‘bourgeois revolution’ would then bring about another pluralistic socialist revolution. As the landed and affluent middle class grows – as it has exponentially in China over the past few decades – they become and increasingly influential political and economic force.

Struggles over the reform of land-rights have been ripe battlegrounds within the secretive machinations of the country’s leadership. Outspoken proponents of such and other civil reforms have been attacked and vilified both in life and in death – think of Zhao Ziyang’s home imprisonment for the last 15 years of his life or the purge of Peng Dehuai after he spoke about the nation’s massive starvation in the 1960’s.

Eventually in 2007 a new law was passed and whilst it stated that “The Property Law allows for ownership of exclusive parts within an apartment building, which endorses the individual ownership of apartments.” (Article 70). It also maintained that only state backed and approved construction projects can take place but in these cases the official buildings: “As a protection of the right, the term of the right shall be automatically renewed upon expiration” (Article 149). The law also prohibits any foreign company from purchasing or developing land, an effort to avoid ‘Bourneville” stlye conurbations springing up to allow companies to attract a better quality of worker. The key part is article 12 which enshrines the limited lease system and over-rules all other articles pertaining to land use rights. These leases can only be obtained from the central party and have only gone to party insiders.

This all leaves the aforementioned burgeoning middle class in an overtly tough situation. Their rights have not changed yet the country is unrecognizable. They own limited leases on properties in some of the fastest growing cities in the world. They pay billions of dollars in rentals and mortgages to a handful of people and can not guarantee that they will be able to re-new this lease at its conclusion. Land prices in Shanghai alone have increased more than 200 fold since the death of Mao and China has already a property bubble as cartelled prices have outstripped even the country’s rampant inflation yet they show no signs of coming down.

Regardless of the rhetoric and impressions which it may give, China is a feudalist state run by a tiny isolated plutocratic oligarchy, who hold corruption and nepotism in highest regard, at the expense of a massive ‘modern peasant class’. The elite’s children, known as ‘princelings’, drive Ferraris and, literally, get away with murder.

The final aspect of the Party’s control may seem to be a little thing but is in fact the key to maintaining the power all legal questions of property ownership: notaries. Civil Law Notaries may seem a dull part of western beaurocracy but they ensure an independent legal recognition of the purchase and ownership of property. Yet in China only state run banks may offer mortgages on the leases and only the city administrators may offer these leases. This means that the only people able to save properties or enforce ownership are the same people who are in charge of pulling them down and increasing the land values within the cities. This is why no-one in China has effectively defended their home or business property.

One of the most repeated dogmas in China is that, as a rapidly developing country things can not progress as smoothly as in western countries due to the timescale. In fact, China is in the fortunate position of developing in a time when the mistakes have been made before by otters. Yet, the leadership has created a property bubble and crash, an inaccessible housing market and rampant landlordism under the control of a small cabal of party insiders. The social problems this has caused in other countries are well documented but none of those countries has the population size and discrepancies of wealth that China does. There is no welfare state, no free healthcare or even sick leave. There is talk of a minimum wage but it is to be set at 40% of the average for the city making it, infact, a tool to hold down wages.

More than 700 million people in China earn less than $2 a day, half of them less than one. A further 300 million earn less than $6,500 a year and an average flat cost $31 per square metre for rentals alone, residential sales to first time buyers fell to under 10% of the market in 2011. Which, considering there are 7 million university students graduating every year, all of whom are expected to be married by 25 at which point the groom is expected to buy a home for the family, indicates much more serious social problems down the line.

This is one of the biggest of many problems on the horizon for China, combine it with and ageing population, devastating pollution and impeding resource shortages and things look as unpredictable in the future as they did in the past. The Bo Xi Lai scandal may have made the party look briefly unsteady but the arrest of Ai Wei Wei and the exile of Chen GuangCheng show that it will continue to crush its enemies no matter how big or small and when the darkest days come, they may look to their tanks again.