From the Washington Post:
For weeks, the little house sitting stubbornly atop an earthen pillar in the middle of a busy construction site was a symbol of individual rights in the face of China’s breakneck and often heedless economic development.
Reporters from across China and beyond traveled to Chongqing, a sprawling Sichuan city 900 miles southwest of Beijing, to document the campaign by Wu Ping and her husband, Yang Wu, to get more compensation for the small building where they had lived and run a restaurant for years. As they repeated tirelessly into reporters’ microphones, they were the lone holdouts among the owners of 280 houses bulldozed since 2004 to make way for a shopping center — and they vowed not to move until they got what they wanted…
The nationwide attention given to the Chongqing drama hinted at the frustration felt by many Chinese over the lack of legal protection for individuals in a country where business and government are cooperating closely in the pursuit of economic growth. The house was gleefully labeled a “nail house,” borrowing from a popular Chinese expression in which a “nail” is a person who sticks out by refusing to submit to authority. [Full Text]
See FP blog and China Daily’s report on the “nail house” case.
