by Rob Schmitz
The corruption among China’s top leadership, though, made land seizures seem like stealing candy from a corner store. For years, the elite ruling families of China had accumulated billions of dollars’ worth of company shares and real estate by leveraging their positions of power. News of this, however, was blocked from the Internet inside of China. Instead, local reports of China’s leaders were often accompanied by photo ops of leaders checking in on rural schools and hospitals, making sure all was well. To the common folk of Maggie Lane, it was clear who the good guys and bad guys were. The truth, though, wasn’t always so black and white.
The leadership in Beijing not only knew about these rampant land seizures, they had created and maintained the system that had perpetuated the practice. Li Ping, a lawyer for the international property rights advocacy group Landesa in Beijing, laid it out simply: “Most taxes that are collected—more than seventy percent typically—go straight to the central government, leaving local governments with no other way to generate revenue,” he said.
Li was one of the country’s most prominent property rights experts. China’s State Council sought his advice when drafting new laws. Li believed that local governments had become addicted to seizing land because it was the only way to generate enough revenue to fulfill its mandate of providing services to its residents. He thought the best solution would be a combination of allowing local governments to start collecting property taxes—unlike most homeowners in the West, most Chinese aren’t required to pay taxes on their property—and implementing market-style reforms by giving governments the freedom to issue municipal bonds, a measure some Chinese cities began taking in 2014.
With the current pace of local government land seizures, it was clear something had to be done. Li estimated that up to 2013, local officials had illegally seized land belonging to at least 40 million Chinese. “According to the current pace of land expropriation, that will add three million people every year,” Li said. “If compensation is not adequate, you basically add three million more dissidents in China each and every year.”
XI GUOZHEN (no relation to Mayor Chen’s wife Xie Guozhen) was one of them. Mayor Chen had told me the story of how Xi’s husband had burned to death fighting the same demolition crew that had bullied Maggie Lane’s residents. His horrific final moments took place across the street from Maggie Lane on the plot of land where I now lived.
Xi’s name was pronounced “She.” The day I met her, she had just stepped off a high-speed train from Beijing. Early the same morning, she was released from a Beijing jail after being arrested for petitioning China’s leaders. She had served her sentence at Majialou, a former police station that had been reopened to detain people who had come to the capital from all over China to complain to the central government. Their grievances—anything from land seizures to higher-level corruption—had been ignored by courts run by the very people they were complaining about. After arriving in Beijing, they had been apprehended by “interceptors,” thugs hired by their hometown governments.
Majialou was like a second home for Xi. “I’ve been in and out of there for half a year now,” she said.
“One time I spent fourteen days there, one time nine days, one time six days, the time before this thirty-eight days, and this time six days again. Whenever they let me out, I go straight back to Zhongnanhai,” she said, referring to the central headquarters for China’s Communist Party along Tian’anmen Square.
At Zhongnanhai, Xi would unfurl a banner or throw leaflets about her case right in front of security guards. Within seconds, they would tackle her, arrest her, and throw her in a van headed back to Majialou. “My life is on repeat,” she told me.
The harsh cycle of Xi’s life had taken a toll on her body. In the past six months, the sixty-one-year-old said she had been dragged across the prison by her hair, beaten up by her captors several times; on one occasion they had broken a few of her ribs. She had become overweight and bags were beginning to form underneath her brown eyes.
Xi once owned an apartment on the second floor of a house inside a small lane off the Street of Eternal Happiness, several stories below where my own home now stood. She grew up in the apartment and, later as an adult, she lived there with her husband, a thin man with a boyish face and glasses named Zhu Jianzhong. The couple had a son and they ran a tailor shop from home. “My husband would measure the clothes, and I’d do all the stitching,” she told me. “We were quite famous in the neighborhood.”
Hundreds of families lived in their single-square-block neighborhood. Their apartments weren’t as nice as those across the street in Maggie Lane; a typical family lived in a space of a few hundred square feet with a simple kitchen. The public bathrooms were a quick stroll down the lane.
In 1992, the Xuhui District government auctioned off the land to a Hong Kong developer owned by Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Asia, to build what would later become the Summit—the complex I lived in—and an office building called the Center, the forty-five-story tower across the street from CK’s sandwich shop. Li’s company worked with a crew from Chengkai Group to negotiate resettlement with the lane’s residents, the same group of men, in fact, that would later botch the Maggie Lane demolition by murdering an elderly couple.
The developer offered residents a modest resettlement sum and tiny apartments in a new complex bordering farmland an hour away from Shanghai. Most residents accepted the deal and Chengkai began to demolish the vacated homes, but Xi and her husband stayed put. She was born here, grew up here, and now she and her husband ran a neighborhood business here, she told the crew. Everyone who was important to them lived within a few blocks. If you want us to move, she told them, resettle us nearby. By 1996, they were one of the last remaining families in their lane.
On the morning of October 17, 1996, Xi was walking home from the market when she saw them: six men and women from the demolition crew propping a ladder up against their balcony. She screamed for her husband, and someone tackled her. A woman and two men forced her into a car, breaking her fingers. Hearing the scuffle outside, her husband came onto the balcony, but it was too late. A few men had already climbed the ladder to his apartment. They shoved him inside as Xi watched, still wrestling with the crew below. From inside came yelling and a loud crash, and after a few minutes, a cloud of smoke rose from the balcony window. The crew emerged from the building, but Zhu did not. Within minutes, the building was engulfed in flames, leaving a trail of black smoke high above a crowd of onlookers along the Street of Eternal Happiness.
The police report alleged Xi’s husband had poured banana oil—used for removing stains from customers’ clothes—over himself and set himself on fire, injuring men from the demolition crew in the process. Xi refused to believe this. “He didn’t want to die. My theory is that this group of men beat my husband up and they had severely injured him or had killed him,” she said, “and they set him on fire to cover up what had happened.”
After the fire, she was taken to a hotel and locked in a dark room. In the evening, a tall man from Chengkai Group opened the door. “He said, ‘It took seconds for your husband to die.’ ”
Xi screamed at the man, accusing his crew of murdering someone like them: a common person, a laobaixing.
“Then he interrupted me,” she said, “and he asked me, ‘Does your family have a special background? Are you friends with anyone in the Party? Killing a laobaixing is like killing an ant.’ ”
Xi discovered later that Yang Sunqin, the man from Chengkai’s demolition crew who coordinated the demolition of their home, had been promoted for removing them from their property. Nine years later, a court would sentence Yang to death for burning the elderly couple alive in their beds across the street in Maggie Lane.
In return for the loss of her home and her husband, the Xuhui government gave Xi a small apartment several blocks away and a shop space across the Huangpu River in Pudong that she could rent out for income. Later, police officers asked her to sign a document confirming sh
e had received compensation, but she refused. Doing so would be akin to confirming the police account of what had happened. She told the officers she wouldn’t give up until they conducted a proper investigation.
Xi estimated she’d visited the police station more than a hundred times since then to request an investigation into her husband’s death, but none was ever authorized. As a result, she’s spent the last ten years petitioning officials in Beijing and has been imprisoned more times than she can remember.
Her perseverance was impressive, but it also seemed pointless. Why continue to seek justice from an unjust legal system? She had heard this rationale before, and she didn’t pause to think. “My husband’s soul is still there. If I give up, the Communist Party wins, and they can laugh at us. I’m fighting for his soul.”
“What do you think your husband would think about what you are doing?” I asked.
Xi thought for a moment. “If he were here, he’d try to persuade me to stop,” she admitted. “Sometimes at night I dream of him pleading for me to stop. But I won’t. I don’t want to disappoint him.”
This type of determination was typical among petitioners. After years of reporting in China, I had interviewed several of them. When I mentioned their stories to my Chinese friends in Shanghai, they often shook their heads as if these people were an embarrassment to the whole nation. They saw petitioners as desperate, penniless, and uneducated commoners who were all slightly out of touch with reality. China’s state-run media had helped push this idea, and petitioners’ fearlessness—repeatedly getting beat up and thrown into prison—was baffling to many in a culture that emphasized a pragmatic approach to settling problems.
It seemed like a harsh criticism of people whose lives had suffered terrible damage from people in power, but I sometimes found myself agreeing with the stereotype. Though their causes were usually just from a moral standpoint, many of the petitioners I knew seemed dysfunctional and unbalanced. Their quests to right society’s wrongs often seemed unreasonable given the harsh system they were up against. Fighting China’s system almost never produced good results. It was like trying to swim against a powerful rip current: You would likely drown. My neighbors along the street who successfully navigated this system—people like CK and Zhao—refused to allow it to drag them to unknown depths. Instead, they swam with careful strokes at an angle that followed the current but took them to the edge of it, carving their own way while ceding control to its raw power.
XI’S SON WEIQI was ten years old when his father burned to death. When he found out what happened, he stopped speaking. Xi remembers him staring out into space. The day after his father’s death, she found Weiqi with his forehead against the wall of the hotel room where they were detained, hitting it with closed fists. “He just pounded the walls over and over,” Xi told me. “Peng. Peng. Peng. He wouldn’t stop. His knuckles were a bloody mess.”
Xi said her son’s personality took a permanent turn. Before his father’s death, the child had been outgoing, talkative, a natural leader. Among the children in the lane, it was Weiqi who had always organized games of marbles or tag after school. When his father died, he became shy, serious, and intense. The boy preferred to spend time alone.
That was eighteen years ago. I was almost scared to ask what had become of him. “Oh, he’s studying in the U.S.,” Xi said. “He’s finishing his doctorate at Kang Nai Er.”
I didn’t recognize the name, so she said it again: Kang Nai Er. I repeated it a few times, waiting for the phonological synapse to fire, and then it hit me: Cornell.
THE LONGER I LIVED in China the more I realized that for every dreadful story that dragged my pessimism for the country’s future to a new low, there was someone like Weiqi who could restore my hope. Weiqi’s story alone encompassed opposite poles of this duality.
Weiqi’s name is pronounced “Way-chee.” I met him over Skype. It was eight in the evening on a weekday night and he spoke to me from inside his office at a bank in Hong Kong. He had taken a job there to be closer to his mother while he finished writing his doctoral thesis. The poor Internet connection frequently froze the image of his face on my screen: a little pudgy, with eyebrows that were fixed close together. They framed narrow eyes with lids that seemed perpetually tightened, as if he were scrutinizing everything he heard. We spoke in English, and he chose his words carefully, speaking in a slow and deliberate cadence. He was rational and curious, asking me just as many questions as I asked him, and he was never emotional. He reminded me a little of Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
Weiqi told me that growing up in his quiet lane off the Street of Eternal Happiness was like being brought up in a village. Your entire life unfolded within two blocks where everyone knew everything about your family. He was eight years old when he first left this nest. It was 1994 and Shanghai’s first subway line had just opened. A station had appeared just a block away. For Weiqi, a single word summed up his memory of that first ride: “People,” he said. “I had never seen that many people before in one small space.”
Weiqi had spent his short life tucked away inside a lane in the heart of the most populated city of the most populated country on the planet, and it was the first time he had come into contact with Shanghai’s enormity. “I grabbed tightly onto my father’s hand. I was so scared of getting lost,” he said.
When the subway first opened, there were two types of tickets. For one yuan, you could experience what it was like to ride in a subway, but you had to return to the same station you started from. Weiqi’s parents bought the two-yuan tickets, which allowed them to get off somewhere else.
They took a trip to Xinzhuang, the place where they were told they would be relocated. It was the last station of a forty-minute trip to the end of the subway line. “When we got out of the station, there wasn’t anything there—no homes, no shops, nothing,” Weiqi told me. “The roads were just being paved for the first time, and there were farm fields all around. We knew right away we didn’t want to move there.”
Weiqi said life in the lane was simple and happy. They were poor, but so was everyone else. It was the early ’90s, and China’s economy had yet to take off, but there was optimism in the air. “It wasn’t so hierarchical like it is today. Everyone was looking ahead.”
Weiqi said one of the reasons for his success was that he had grown up in a place where he never felt any pressure. He was a leader of the kids in his lane, staying up late into the evening not to study, but to play hide-and-seek in the alleys. His father worked hard, but he wasn’t strict with his son. “We Chinese have a saying: ‘Cimu, Yanfu’—mothers are kind to their children, and fathers are strict—this is a typical Chinese family,” Weiqi told me over Skype. “But my parents were the opposite. My mother held me to high standards. My father was more like a friend. Most parents of people in my generation weren’t like that. They were more like coaches to their children.”
Weiqi used to watch the U.S. sitcom Growing Pains with his dad, one of the few American programs on television back in those days. “My father was kind of like the dad in that series,” he told me. “His parenting style was similar to how a foreigner would raise their children.”
Weiqi worked at UBS Bank in Hong Kong, analyzing secondary markets. “Very boring work, but the pay is high,” he said.
Weiqi’s uncle and aunt—both wealthy businesspeople in Shanghai—lent him money to attend an Ivy League university in the United States. His doctoral dissertation focused on how people respond to economic crises. Weiqi had mapped out statistical models based on how people had behaved in the wake of the 1984 and 2008 economic disasters in the United States. The behavioral finance models might someday prove useful in the wake of future crises.
His mother told me that ever since Weiqi’s father died, her son had concentrated on his studies. “He wanted to work hard. He would cry when I dragged him to go petition the government with me, so I stopped. He preferred to study. He told me, ‘Mom, I can change my fate with the power of knowledge.’ He was
very precocious.”
Back then, Weiqi’s mother shuttled back and forth to Beijing on her petitioning trips, while he spent nights studying alone in the tiny Shanghai apartment the government had relocated them to, making his own meals and waking himself up to go to school in the morning. His grandparents on his father’s side were angry with his mother for her stubbornness and for leaving Weiqi at home alone, but Weiqi never seemed frustrated. “I pretty much have always agreed with her, because first and foremost I think what she’s doing is right,” Weiqi told me. “I think it’s the most basic pursuit of a human being. It’s become her life’s task, her only goal, almost like a religion. If I try to stop her or even express a different opinion about what she’s doing, she’ll feel really, really lost and sad. I’m her only son, and if I don’t support her, I can’t imagine what it would do to her.”
Weiqi was more worried about his mother’s health and her lifestyle. “She might be healthy now, but what if she’s still doing this in five years? There needs to be a time when she should stop and go back to a normal life.”
Because of her political activity, Xi wasn’t allowed to visit her son in Hong Kong. She told me she hoped to live with her son in the United States someday, but this, too, seemed doubtful for someone who made a habit of protesting in front of the headquarters of China’s leadership.