China's competition for living space | DW Documentary

China's cities are growing at a dizzying pace. Megametropolis with shiny facades for the ultra-rich. This is what big cities really want. The way they think is to have the high end. They call them the high-level population. More and more Chinese are moving from the countryside to the city. But beyond the shiny skyscrapers, the streets are narrow, noisy and dirty. There is no regulation or law in China that protects tenants' rights. Homeowners are expropriated and forced to give in to the construction boom. Construction

space

is in high demand. Those left behind have no legal recourse; They despair.

My house is no longer there. Shot down. Everything is gone. China's fight for

living

space

. Li Qizhong is ready to defend his home to the end. China as such does not have a particularly dense population. But its sprawling urban agglomerations do. Cities with millions of inhabitants are practically emerging overnight. Megacities: modern, glamorous and full of superlatives. In 1980, 20% of the Chinese population lived in cities. Today that figure has increased to 60%: more than 800 million people. No country in the world has so many large cities with more than a million inhabitants; China has more than 100. Experts expect that number to double within a few years.

German architect Erk Schaffarczyk moved to China when its boom was already underway. He has lived and worked here for 11 years. Of course, everyone thinks you can make your fortune in the biggest cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen), that's where the big money is. It's part of the Chinese dream to live and work in big, dazzling cities. But most former rural residents looking for work can't afford it. Millions of them are constantly on the move, as migrant workers. Which is sad, because it's not just a few, but several hundred million. I don't know the exact number, but 200 or 300 million people, maybe more, are constantly wandering from one place to another to earn money because they can't do it at home.

There they could only work in the fields, and even that is not so easy anymore, because so much land is so contaminated that it has become completely infertile. The rural exodus has caused a rapid increase in rents in cities. In 2017, an apartment in Beijing cost around 620 euros to rent, while the average salary of a Beijing civil servant was around 1,400 euros, barely double the rent. In comparison: a migrant worker earned about 455 euros per month in 2017, which made an apartment in the city well beyond their means. Author David Bandurski has lived in Hong Kong for 14 years. He has witnessed up close social unrest across China.

They can't afford these new apartments being built. These very quickly, in the nineties, were getting really expensive. And you needed to have a proper job, a proper work permit, etc., even to be able to buy property. So they were country people who lived and worked in the city. And it was natural that they looked for spaces that accepted them. This is where migrant and low-income workers can afford to live: in China's so-called urban villages. Formerly true villages surrounded by fields, today they are surrounded by the city. Without glitter or glass facades, but affordable. Places that mostly remain hidden from the curious gaze of tourists.

And that is a village, just a small urban space, almost like a big city block, just full of immigrants. In the heart of the megacity Shenzhen, we managed to film one of these slums. Here people live overcrowded and in the most difficult conditions. Filming is not officially permitted: we were not granted permission to capture the dark side of China's economic rise. If you rent a room in a very central town it may cost you more than one in the outskirts, but you can find a room, perhaps shared, and pay 200, 300 or 500 renminbi a month: 40 or 50 euros or something like that. 50 euros for a sleeping place in a residence compared to 620 for a complete apartment.

We want to learn more about the

living

conditions of residents here. Mrs. Li shows us her apartment. She, her husband and her daughter share 7m². Although she and her husband have jobs, they can't afford anything bigger. At least they have a window; that is not always the case. They have to pay for electricity, water and even school. City life is expensive. The room costs 100 euros per month. A house outside the urban area is out of the question. Other neighbors also show us their spaces. Although we try to go as unnoticed as possible, we get caught several times: cameras are not allowed.

We stopped filming. China is a surveillance state, but the police cannot be everywhere. But in these poor areas we stand out even more as foreigners. Architecture professor Juan Du works at the University of Hong Kong. He specializes in large metropolitan areas and urban towns. There are urban villages in every city in China. Some have hundreds, some thousands, some have a handful. For decades, the Chinese government has considered urban villages to be eyesores that hinder progress and modernization. They had to disappear from the urban landscape... and make room for the new, modern way of life. Make room for skyscrapers and shopping malls, something so urgently needed that urban villages must make way for them.

And the neighbors: they barely put up any resistance. They know there's little point in confronting the government, so they pack up what little they own and move on. Most of the reasons why a government would want to be part of an urban village demolition process is because the government or developer believes there is a much better or more valuable use for that land. Municipal governments say urban villagers should vacate their homes voluntarily and not stand in the way of potential investors. Severance payments often make it easier to let go. But those who still refuse to leave are under enormous pressure.

We learned what that meant in Guangzhou in 2012. In the middle of a field of debris, marking an ancient urban village, we met Li Jie. She had been arrested for not leaving her house. She told me to write a confession. She was very afraid and I don't write well. I told her: she couldn't write. Then a fellow prisoner wrote something for me. This here. He told me that was my official objection to the demolition of the house. He was very scared. I was confused. I just wanted to go out. Even death would have been better. The police were very cruel.

They had these stun guns. I was terrified. That's why I just signed. I signed and they let me go. The writer and researcher David Bandurski knows of many cases like Li Jie's. He himself was in Guangzhou in 2012. In many cases like this, you can see absolute desperation. And it varies from town to town, but there are a lot of people in this place. They have nowhere to go, there is no future for them, no pensions, no place to live, their community has disappeared and they feel simply desperate. With her forced signature, Li Jie, who cannot read or write, formally agreed to the demolition of her house.

She received no compensation and her firm waived any further claims. So here I am. One day I stay with one person and the next day with another. What I can do? My house is no longer there. Shot down. Everything is gone. Now I can only stay here. What's left to do? It's like they want me dead... The next day, Li Jie jumped off the roof of a building and committed suicide. Many people jump from apartment towers. If you've lived in the same place for more than six generations, then it's hard to understand when someone shows up one day and tells you it's over and you have to leave.

Or you are no longer welcome, you have to make way for something else, a highway or an Olympic stadium or just another skyscraper. These events were particularly extreme in Shenzhen. In 1980, Supreme Leader Deng Xiaoping proclaimed one of China's first special economic zones in what was then a small city of just under 59,000 residents. Between 1980 and 2010, according to a UN report, Shenzhen was the fastest growing city in human history. The city devoured neighboring farmlands and engulfed entire towns. Today, official figures say that Shenzhen has more than 12 million inhabitants; in reality, it's probably more than 16. The surrounding agricultural areas are still being rezoned as buildable land by decree.

Urban villages within the city are also expected to make way for lucrative new buildings. The central government passed a law. All village lands within a given neighborhood became national property. That is to say: the land is no longer owned by the villagers, it is owned by the government. So this is done through a law, through a national law. So it cannot be said that it is illegal. You can say that what we can argue is the legality or correctness of the law, but it is a national law. Therefore, the villagers found themselves overnight without owning the land.

This government decree from the 1990s established that agricultural land belonged to the state. The farmers who tilled the land had no choice but to give in to the wishes of the State: convert the land into money. They transfer land from collective lands, which are rural lands and belong to the collective of the community, and transfer them to lands that are basically state-owned, which means they can be developed. And then they basically auction the land to private or state-linked (often state-owned) developers: large companies that then build apartments and infrastructure and that sort of thing. In the end, all that was left for the farmers were their houses in the center of town.

Under Chinese law, these belong to the collective of all villagers and, as such, cannot be expropriated so easily. The villagers living in these local city villages: The urban villagers recognized a huge economic opportunity. I will take my one or two story apartment on my collective land and build it on seven or eight stories (as much real estate as I can get) and rent it to immigrant families or individual immigrants who arrive. That's what happened: they became owners. Farmers, deprived of their fields, had to find creative ways to make money. They build their houses as cheaply and efficiently as possible, as tall as the foundations allow.

It is still common practice today. And in China there is even a word for it. The word for agriculture is: "chong di" - "cultivate the land." And they talk about “chong fa”: “cultivating a house or cultivating a house.” The new owners have to quickly build up this messy living space so they can rent it out as soon as possible. Building regulations, such as those that gleaming modern palaces must comply with, are of no importance here. It is true that when you enter these urban towns it is usually very dark. Basically, the power grid is completely improvised.

You have cables that just cross each other. They look like cobwebs in this almost cavernous environment. The reason for this cave-like environment is because on the first floor they build a certain level. There can be 3 meters between buildings as a kind of lax regulation. They can't be too close together. You need some access for fire vehicles if you need them. And on the second level they build. Because they want to maximize the space: the space to rent. More square meters means more income. So you get this kind of compression of space, until when you're on the bottom level and you look up, there's just a ray of sunlight.

And they call that “xian tien” or “sky line” in Chinese. It's almost like seeing light under a closed door. It's just a little bit. And then imagine that. And you have open sewers. This type of bubbling open sewers that smell like sewage. So I think a lot of people coming into the space would say, yeah, this is unacceptable for urban living. We are in Baishizhou urban village. Once again, we do not have permission to shoot. It's loud and stuffy. Moist air condenses on the sides of buildings. The houses are overcrowded and the dark, narrow alleys are filled with old food, mold and urine.

Many of the buildings do not have working bathrooms. Running water or a washing machine are luxuries that almost no one can afford here. Urban villages are scattered throughout the central areas of China's major cities. Its inhabitants paid the price for the rise of their country, and they are reminded of that every day. Even for those who are less unfortunate. In China, even in a city like Shenzhen, the prevailing public image is that everyone is dirty, everyone is unhealthy, everyone is bad. That is the public image. The low-wage workers who live here are the main contributors to the cities' economic flourishing.

Still, they are a thorn in the side of the government. They want to build profitable apartment buildings there and sell the land to developers for a lot of money. Because this is still a main source of income for many cities in China. They are not incometax, income taxes. They are income from the sale of land. Huge profits will be made in the real estate and real estate market in major Chinese cities. By summer 2019, average property prices in Shenzhen had skyrocketed compared to 10 years earlier. In Beijing they also increased sharply. Building land is becoming increasingly scarce and anyone who gets it cheap can expect big profits.

This creates a situation where the city is determined to take the villagers' land and they do not want to pay a fair price for that land. They want it cheap so they can sell it and make a profit to the developers. Across the country, the government is forcing urban villages to give way to new construction projects, in the name of progress. The local protest is mostly in vain. Police, municipal administrations and construction contractors form a powerful alliance, something the public should not be aware of. The land is not owned by individual villagers. The land is the collective property of the people.

What that means is that the town collective is, in some cases, a handful of older men who have a lot of bargaining power. So, most of the time, when there are negotiations between a developer or the government over the fate of certain villages, they are not going to go to all the villagers. They go to see the village representatives, who are usually the village elders, the village collective. Villagers are at the mercy of the negotiating skills of their representatives and do not always act in the best interests of the community. Time and again negotiations take place behind the backs of the affected owners.

There have been examples where villagers had no idea that the head of the village collective enterprise had signed an agreement with a developer to sell the village from him. And they took the money and left China. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes in urban villages. Only a few dare to take a stand. One of them is Li Qizhong in Guangzhou. He faces off against the city administration and a powerful contractor. His family has lived in the urban village of Yangji for generations. Formerly it was an agricultural town with 3,000 inhabitants.

It has now become home to more than 70,000 migrant workers in the middle of Guangzhou's financial district. Why do they tear it down so early, at 6 in the morning? Because they want to do it secretly. We met Li, his wife, and his two children for the first time in 2012. They are the last remaining residents in his building. Not long ago, 50 people shared the same roof. They had come to the city from the countryside in the hope of a better life. Li Qizhong's family has owned the house and surrounding land for generations. He has documents that prove it.

This is a title deed from the 32nd year of the Republic of China. That would be 1943. In the eighth month of the moon. 70 years ago. 70 years! Older than the Communist Party. Older than the People's Republic of China. This document is not just a property title: it also shows that Li is officially a rural citizen with fewer rights in the city. China has a system called household registration, where people are actually registered in their urban or rural area, usually at birth. The system dates back to the 1950s. At that time, each household had to make a decision. “Rural” meant that they had the right to a plot of land for subsistence farming. “Urban” guaranteed a place to work, subsidized housing, access to education and health care, and a pension.

Legally speaking, Li Qizhong is a rural resident. Outside the urban center in which he lives, he does not have the right to use public services. Unless he manages to buy an apartment in the city. But until he buys property in the city, he will not be able to obtain the local registration card from him: the so-called Hukou. You simply don't have local registration, which means it's almost impossible to get into local schools, your child won't have school, and you won't have access to healthcare. Fair compensation for the house would help alleviate the family's desperate financial situation: they could stay in the city, buy an apartment, register and find work.

This is what Li Qizhong wants. But neither the city administration nor the construction contractor will find out about it. But he won't back down. He has agreed to let us film his fight. That night the utility lines to his house are cut. They cut off the light. Here come the police. But that won't stop them. Nobody expects help from the police. The family is forced to improvise. Water is only available at the edge of what has become a rubble desert. To get there, they have to face a group of angry construction workers. A generator supplies electricity to the family.

Li is always on guard and hasn't left the house for months. He's heard of cases where construction workers rushed to deal with residents like him, and that scares him. But he wants to endure until the end, for himself and his family. And that is why there is this whole phenomenon of what we call 'nail houses' or in Chinese: 'Dingzi hu'. Individual owners, landlords - they call them 'landlords'... Villagers who decide to stay on their property, who are going to hold out and wait for adequate compensation by going head to head with the local real estate company and the city leaders.

And there they stay. They call them “nail houses” because they are like nails that cannot be pulled out. There are hundreds of nail houses in China, some of which have appeared on the front pages of international newspapers. A protest sign that usually breaks at some point. The chances of winning the battle are slim. The other side is too powerful and people evicted from their homes are often hurt in the process. Li Qizhong knows this and is preparing as if for battle. You can throw that out the window. He has a brick as an anchor. Then I can light the fuse and run away.

Li Qizhong has prepared enough homemade explosives to take down everything. If someone gets in, he won't get out alive. He films himself as he places them all over the building. That fuse is for this room. This is for the stairs one floor below, the second floor. The entrance stairs. That one over there... is for the rooms on the ground floor. This connects the gas to the roof. The bombs on the roof: here and here. Everything is labeled. If you're going to do it, you have to do it right. So the nail-pounding guy, who basically sets up his six-story building like an explosive device ready to go off as soon as his house is invaded, is just a reflection of the violent city government that is in cahoots with the real estate developer who will cut it down. their power lines, beat their relatives and harass their children on the way to school.

The tactics are not much different on either side. Both sides are resorting to violence and the threat of violence to get what they want. It's the law of the jungle. Li Qizhong's resistance has pushed construction work months behind schedule. The tension increases in the work. The bosses transmit their frustration to their employees: if nothing is built, no one gets paid. The first workers lose patience and attack a former neighbor. Li Qizhong, trapped in his own home, is unable to come to his aid. The police arrive, but do not intervene. You police officers are all criminals! Nothing more than petty criminals.

The big criminals are corrupt officials. You simply represent the government. You only say what the government tells you. I say the truth. Go ahead, write to me. Charge me with whatever you want. I've already been to court. You only act in the interest of the government. Your job is to uphold the law, but you don't do it. Officially, all the owners of the town have received generous compensation. Li Qizhong denies this and speaks of corrupt officials embezzling funds. Sure, the government has paid money, he says, but he doesn't care who gets it. There are many examples of corruption in the area, including: the government would provide a certain monthly amount (a certain amount of yen per person, per village resident, per month, for a period of three years, for example), for the loss of their livelihoods as they took over farmland.

Because this was the source of sustenance. And I had documents from the time that were provided to me, which would show that basically the village chief had over-reported the number of eligible villagers. So you look at the list of the village population and what was reported to the city authorities, with all the seals, from the county level, from this office, from that one, from everyone who was probably involved, to report excess amount of compensation owed. But where did the compensation go? For years, corruption has been one of China's most serious problems and the government is determined to tackle it.

It seems to have spread everywhere, even to the real estate market. If you talk to most people in a city like Shenzhen, they would tell you that the villagers have won the lottery: that most of the villagers, in exchange for their land or their buildings, received a huge amount of money. Li Qizhong swears that he still has. to see a single yuan. But after months of psychological warfare, he has relented a little. His wife and two children moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in another urban town that is still standing. From now on, Li Qizhong will be alone.

He's not sure he'll ever see his family again. The only thing he is sure of is that the construction workers will continue to pressure him, if necessary, with force. Its a big problem. Because they learn from the system that violence is what solves the problem. Every night we see how the construction companies send another band of hooligans. They throw stones at the windows and ensure that the few remaining residents cannot rest. As soon as the thugs disappear, the police show up. As long as the thugs stay, the police will never show up. More than 60 weeks have passed and Li Qizhong is completely exhausted.

Sleep is out of the question. The risk of an attack failing and being unable to defend is too great. I don't know if it's day or night. The construction company's thugs usually attack after midnight. They break windows, they bang on doors. It's constant chaos. They put us nail house residents under enormous pressure. I guess it's already past midnight: 4 in the morning. They will probably attack again around five in the afternoon. He feels condemned to sit and wait. For months he has defended his house like a fortress. The broken windows are closed with metal rods and wooden boards.

There is almost no daylight. In his previous life, Li was a simple worker. He now faces a huge enemy in a war of attrition. Stability is used as justification to persecute these resisting villagers. They are considered dangerous. But the result of this type of conflict is: real instability. The fact that they cannot protect the rights of these villagers systematically and fairly. Li Qizhong's situation became desperate in 2013, after more than a year of conflict. One morning a demolition company arrived with heavy equipment. Li used the camera we gave him to document what was happening to the residents of the nail house.

When he couldn't think of anything else to do, he dialed the citizen hotline number. The situation threatens to get out of control. We retreat to a safe place. The construction workers make their way into the nail houses with the intention of removing Li Qizhong and the last remaining neighbors from the house. Technically that's against the law, so they try to do it as quickly and quietly as possible. But the men fight back and detonate their own made explosives. They are loud and anything but subtle. The noise caused by the explosive devices and Li's loud screams cause the thugs to call off the attack.

Li Qizhong's tenacious battle might be an exception to the rule, but it is not the only one. Across China, protests against the demolition of urban villages have been growing for more than 10 years. Protesters often wear red hats that symbolize membership in the ruling Communist Party. Who dares to use violence against them? Their protest attracts attention, both abroad and in China itself. This collective community was basically resorting to collective action, and not even that: village after village, but village after village... villages coming together with other villages facing similar problems... sharing information on how to protest. What are the effective ways?

What are the legal forms: in terms of protest or petition; how it works, what is effective. In the end, Li Qizhong succeeded. In his case, his strong protest led to an amicable agreement. The construction company finally offered him a sum he could accept. He won't say how much. But his fight left scars. To this day, Li lives in constant fear of revenge. What is the knife for? What if they come for me? What would I do without him? I can't defend myself unarmed. Yes, but those knives... ...I'm ready if they attack me. They will pay for it!

That is whatyou think! No chance without a knife! Hu Jintao was president of the People's Republic of China for 10 years. Xi Jinping became his successor in March 2013. He announced that he would take more decisive measures against corruption. And the situation has improved for slum homeowners. Compensation standards currently exist, but they vary greatly from region to region. We have no way of knowing to what extent they are fulfilled. The sums paid are incredibly high. They mostly buy living space, not only here, but also in other regions. The number of conflicts over the demolition of urban villages has decreased.

But that doesn't mean circumstances have improved for the estimated 300 million immigrant and low-income workers. The destruction of entire slums has left countless people homeless. The migrant workers who suffer – if you want to look at it that way – in these poor conditions are in another urban village. Farther from the city. They have to travel more to work in the supermarket, where this handful of rich people who now live there shop. It's a kind of vicious circle. However, China's real estate boom continues. In 2017, a typical apartment in Shenzhen cost 41 times the average annual salary. For comparison: in the German city of Munich, it cost 13 years' salary.

As a result, 22% (almost a quarter) of apartments in China are empty. Because no one wants or can pay rent, or because landlords expect the price to rise even more. 50 million unoccupied apartments. And there is no end in sight. Now Beijing will merge with Huairou, Tianjin and parts of Hebei, forming a huge triangle. And the population is expected to grow to between 60 and 70 million. I don't know if that will happen, but if the last 10 or 11 years are any guide, it's entirely possible. Shortly after, expectations had risen to 130 million. By 2030, experts estimate that 80% of the population will live in cities.

And none of this would have been possible without low-wage workers. And for them, one question is increasingly pressing: at what price?