Beijing residents feel the pinch of 'development'

It's not just Shanghai residents who are mightily miffed about upping and leaving their homes for what they believe is poor compensation.

Imagethief went to the site which will eventually house the new CCTV building, and took a look at the protest banners and graffiti.

Protest and slogan language tends to be rich in chengyu and pushes the limits of my translation skills, but I've had a go at teasing the main messages out. The language is pretty strong. The gist of the residents complaint seems to be that they are being poorly paid for their old but superbly-located properties, which are just a few minutes from Guomao (China World Trade Center), Tuanjiehu Park, Gognti Beilu and a few other east-side landmarks. This isn't surprising. ... As explored by The Economist in their recent survey and leader, property rights are not well developed in China, and it's unlikely that anything approaching a free-market transaction was involved in the appropriation of the properties and the compensation of the owners. One graffito painted on the front of the building says, "CBD - 4500 yuan per square meter". That's considerably below what even resale properties in the CBD start at these days ...

As always, it's difficult to know whether the people are being compensated "fairly", and what that could even mean. Anyone in the world would be pissed off if they were told that they had to leave their home of XX years so that the insightful and ground-breaking Japanese-War documentaries, Chinese opera re-runs and news bulletins that CCTV thrills in presenting could be broadcast from a snazzier building with better parking facilites (we imagine).

However, it has to happen to someone -- it would be ridiculous for us to complain about the necessity of new developments. The problem would appear to be that, despite our lack of real estate savvy, it is reasonable to imagine that in fact the residents are not being compensated well enough for prime-location city-centre properties.

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