Goodbye to the 'Nail House'

Amazing picture! This has been quite the cause célèbre in the Chinese blogosphere for the last month or so. I only caught on to it at the very end of the saga, via Chinese blogger Yee (who I've been reading for help in defeating Chinese Net censorship). The place was finally torn down last week.

'Nail house' has become a common expression in China over the past decade to describe lone standouts against development, the last householder to defy the bulldozers being like a stubborn nail you just can't pull out of a plank of wood. With all the new building projects going on around the country, this is a very common phenomenon. We have them here in Beijing: there was still one (last time I looked, anyway) in the otherwise desolate waste of what was once the 'South Sanlitun Bar Street'. There are one or two conspicuously tatty old buildings somehow still standing on the snazzily redeveloped Jiugulou Dajie around the corner from me. There are, I suspect, a few still desperately hanging on in Qianmen, the latest area of Beijing to be visited by the wrecking ball.

However, it doesn't often happen that the developers press ahead with the new building while a 'nail house' is still there. In this case, as you can see, they dug out a 50ft deep foundation pit all around it, leaving the house isolated on a pinnacle of earth. It was such a striking image that it attracted a lot of attention all around China, and many people sought to exploit this to highlight their similar grievances, making a pilgrimage to the scene in Chongqing municipality and posting their own complaints at the entrance to the building site. The Chinese media were banned from covering the event (how much attention has it received overseas?), but a young Chinese blogger called 'Zola' decided to go there to cover the story as a 'citizen reporter', taking photos and videos with his phone camera. You can read his story on Global Voices. And there's a series of pictures of China's most famous 'nail house' here.

The Chinese legal framework is pretty ramshackle. Laws are often unclear or contradictory, and their practical consequences can be entirely at the whim of a local court's interpretation. It is only relatively recently that private citizens have acquired the right to 'own' property; but in fact ultimate ownership still resides in the state, and property owners only purchase fixed-term 'land use' rights (currently it's a 70-year period for residential property). Assessing appropriate levels of compensation when land is 'reclaimed' for major construction projects is of course problematical (I have heard here in Beijing, for example, that there are standard compensation scales used based on the type of property and square footage, but that no account is taken of the value of a business based there), and 'compulsory purchase' procedures are rather a muddy affair. There seems to be a lot of argument at the moment about whether the court in this instance had the right to order the demolition of the house. I'd like to try and find out more about the legal ins and outs of this.

Cool picture though, eh?