'Nail house' tests China's new property rights law

By GEOFFREY YORK
Monday, March 26, 2007

It has been dubbed "the nail house." Sticking out like an upright nail, the house and its owner have stubbornly refused to be hammered down by a property developer who has bulldozed everything around it.

The owner, 51-year-old restaurateur Yang Wu, has become a folk hero in China for defending his property rights and refusing to surrender, even when his home became an isolated island in a vast excavated pit at a construction site.

But with the Chinese Internet rapidly transforming the case into a national media sensation, the government stepped into the fray over the weekend, abruptly banning any further reporting or commenting on the nail house.

The publication ban was disclosed Sunday by China Digital Times, a Web site at the University of California that has close contacts with China's Internet community. It quoted a source saying that all Chinese Web media were given an urgent notice on Saturday to delete all feature pages about the nail house, and to block access to all comments on the case.

By Sunday, it reported that the major Chinese Web sites were complying with the ban.

Before the ban, the nail house had become one of the hottest stories on the Chinese Internet. On one Web site alone, more than 156,000 people had visited a special blog about it.

The mainstream Chinese media, too, was fascinated with the case. Even the stodgy China Daily, the main English-language propaganda newspaper, splashed the story prominently on page three of its Saturday edition, complete with a photo. The story quoted enthusiasts who called it "the coolest nail house in history."

The developer, in the booming city of Chongqing on the Yangtze River, is planning to build a six-story shopping mall on the site. With offers of compensation, he has persuaded more than 200 residents to move away. But despite a compensation offer of about $525,000 for his 263-square-yard house, Yang and his wife have refused to leave until they are given a property of similar size in the same area.

Yang is a former kung-fu champion who is admired for his defiant attitude and his toughness. Last week, he used two steel pipes to climb up to his home from the 33-foot-deep pit that surrounds it. At the top, he waved a Chinese flag and a banner reading "No violation of legitimate private property."

Brandishing a set of wooden clubs, he shouted to onlookers: "If anyone dares to come up, I'll beat them back down."

The case is being portrayed as the first major test of China's new property law. Earlier this month, the national parliament passed a historic law that safeguards private property rights for the first time.

Thousands of property disputes have erupted in China in recent years. Many cases are similar to the nail-house case: A private developer buys up a site, gains support from local officials and puts pressure on hundreds of local residents to leave.

The Chinese media have been sympathetic to Yang, with one newspaper saying that he is "fighting for the rights of all property owners in China."

Another newspaper, China Youth Daily, urged the government to support the rights of the homeowner. "If this case of the 'lonely island' persists, it could become a landmark test for Chinese law," it said.

"If the government does not respect people's rights in the case, it will raise suspicions about the entanglement of civil rights, property development and government interests."