Shoved Out, Some Chinese Push Back

They cursed. They smashed beer bottles. They pushed and shoved.

“Qiang fangzi! Qiang fangzi!” they shouted. “House robbers! House robbers!”

In a rare public melee Friday in this bustling city, several dozen residents along the Bund riverfront district protested the forced eviction of a neighbor, who watched helplessly as migrant workers, shielded by about 20 police, loaded his possessions onto a truck.

Residents said the man and his family had lived in the apartment for 40 years, until Rockefeller Group of Japan and an affiliate of the People’s Daily in Beijing joined to develop a part of the area famous for its neoclassical architecture.

A day earlier, the same thing happened to three generations of the Shen family, who occupied a nearby unit in the eight-story building. The Shens’ 70-year-old patriarch said he came home Wednesday to find an eviction notice on the door. The next day their belongings were hauled away.

“Now we are vagrants,” he said.

Since the late 1980s, an estimated 2 million Shanghai residents have been uprooted from their homes to make way for roads, subway lines, five-star hotels and gleaming office towers to house multinational firms. Most people have moved quietly, even as the relocations have split some families and upended lives.

Experts say the Shanghai government has improved its handling of relocations over the years, becoming more transparent and boosting compensation to residents as housing prices have soared. The city also has put pressure on developers who shortchanged residents or coerced them to move.

But the clash persists, driving a wedge between ordinary, often poor citizens seeking greater rights and payment and the government and developers who are pressing ahead with plans to remake Shanghai.

Zheng Shiling, a prominent architecture professor and urban designer in Shanghai, expects a million more people to be ousted from their homes in coming years. Shanghai wants to reduce density in the central city from 9.5 million to 8.5 million, Zheng said. The city also is clearing space to do work for a world’s fair in 2010.

The protest Friday was not an organized event but rather a visceral reaction on a hot, muggy afternoon to a scene that many people in the city fear: an urban version of the rural land confiscations that have triggered rioting among farmers in China.

“Look at this. You call this a harmonic society?” a protester said, sneering at Chinese President Hu Jintao’s motto for the nation. The woman lunged at a representative of the developer but was blocked by police.

The Shanghai Bund Origin Project, which is affecting Shen and dozens of others in the area, has raised eyebrows from the beginning. Many people thought the foreign venture partner was owned by America’s Rockefeller family or connected to it, but it is part of the Mitsubishi conglomerate. The local partner is New Huangpu Group, which is controlled by the People’s Daily, the Beijing-based mouthpiece of the central government.

Pan Yihua, a spokesman for New Huangpu, said his company had court permission for the evictions.

Pan declined to reveal how much the company offered residents to move out, but he said compensation differed based on whether they were owners or renters -- a distinction that is not as clear as it is in the U.S.

Like others in China, residents of the 1928 Art Deco building were granted the right to live there decades ago by the government or state-owned employers, for very low rent. These were common arrangements under the “iron rice bowl” system, in which workers were cared for from cradle to grave. During the 1990s, some tenants in Shanghai became “owners” of their units by paying a small amount to the government. Others maintained the rental arrangement but considered the apartments essentially theirs.

Shen and other tenants said the developer offered them about $1,600 a square yard. They refused, saying it wasn’t enough to buy another home in the area. One person who lives at the opposite end of the street from Shen said the developer paid him about triple that for his flat.

Lei Jingqi, a lawyer who specializes in eviction issues, said compensation of $1,600 a square yard was “too low considering the location.” Lei said a day’s notice before eviction was “surely not appropriate.”

Huangpu’s Pan said he believed that residents were given 10 days’ notice.

On Friday afternoon, just one household in the building was evicted. Despite the scuffles, no arrests or injuries were reported. By late afternoon, it was all over.

Another tenant is expected to be forced out today.