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'Bloody Map' of China pinpoints violent land grabs
Source: Xinhua |
October 26, 2010, Tuesday
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CHINA'S often-violent illegal land grabs and property demolitions are being tagged and recorded on Google maps by a blogger who wants the public to boycott "blood-stained apartments."
The "Bloody Map" site has registered about 50,000 visits by last Friday, and many of the visitors are adding updates to the site.
The map, which identifies about 70 forced land seizures since 2003, was begun by 35-year-old blogger "Bloody Map" - who declines to give his real name - on the popular web portal Sina.com on October 9.
The link at http://t.sina.com.cn/bloodymap directs visitors to two Google maps webpages, which mark places across China that are reportedly sites of land conflicts - some of them deadly. Clicking each mark opens a brief introduction about the dispute.
The "open version" of the map welcomes users to add and revise tags, while the "revised version" contains disputes that have been confirmed by media reports.
The blogger says he named the project "Bloody Map" after discussions with netizens. Marks on the map can be removed after news media report the conflicts resolved.
"Media coverage of and public attention to illegal land seizure disputes can gradually fade out, failing to provide a persistent deterrent to the phenomenon," the blogger told Xinhua. "So it is necessary to find a new way to express people's concerns and try to constrain the problem."
"I'm not conveying any information to the government. I just believe that a responsible citizen should do something for society," he said.
The latest incident, added to the confirmed version four days ago, revealed a conflict earlier this month in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south China, where police cordoned off a village to force about 70 households, who had refused low government compensation, to leave.
Local media had reported that more than 90 percent of the 2,600 villagers had been relocated since 2007 after the local land-use authority launched a commercial development project.
Woman on the roof
Another tag reminds people of a woman who protested against a real estate developer that attempted to demolish her house with force in Yichang City, Hubei Province. Clad only in her underwear, the woman stood on the roof of a building on September 30 and her parents staged a sit-down protest on an adjacent street.
However, a publicity official of Yichang told Xinhua that the woman and the developer reached an agreement with government mediation on the day of the incident and the developer had compensated the woman. The official, who declined to be named, blamed the developer for failing to get approval from the home owner before starting the demolition, but he refused to disclose the content of the agreement or the amount of compensation.
The case had not been removed from the map yet as netizens still believed it should be "judged by time," said Bloody Map.
Other cases include people setting themselves alight, clashes between residents and real estate developers or leaders of local authorities, and other conflicts, some of which led to deaths or serious injuries.
Land acquisition and house demolition was a complicated issue involving the interests of developers, demolition companies, residents, local governments and other parties, so it was still impossible to rely just on the government or the market to resolve problems in a country where the judicial system was still unable to cover everything, said the blogger.
He urges people to "stop buying blood-stained apartments." He also calls on responsible real estate developers to curb brutal behavior.
The map focuses on a prominent social dispute at the center of China's urbanization drive, and reflects a growing civil society where people share a heightened sense of dignity and strong aspirations to participate in public affairs, said Chang Jian, vice director of the human rights research center of Tianjin-based Nankai University.
"Promoting urbanization in an active and stable manner," as stipulated in China's Five-Year Plan in 2001, was reiterated in the country's new roadmap of economic development unveiled last week.
The proposals for formulating the development plan for the next five years (2011-2015) approved by the Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee last Monday also stressed the significance of preparing for unexpected hardships and effectively resolving conflicts.
Land disputes often boil over when developers resort to violent means to remove reluctant home owners when compensation negotiations fail.
The problem could aggravate public discontent and trigger uproar, frustrating those who feel they are excluded and could even turn people against the government, an official with the government of Yichun City, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, told Xinhua.
The map will increase pressure on local authorities, prompting them to re-examine housing issues and living standards, said the official who only identified himself as Gao.
China had 420 million registered Internet users, whose right to freedom of speech was enshrined in the law, and the Internet was a key channel for the government to gauge public opinion, State Council Information Office director Wang Chen said at a human rights forum in Beijing last Wednesday.
The "Bloody Map" site has registered about 50,000 visits by last Friday, and many of the visitors are adding updates to the site.
The map, which identifies about 70 forced land seizures since 2003, was begun by 35-year-old blogger "Bloody Map" - who declines to give his real name - on the popular web portal Sina.com on October 9.
The link at http://t.sina.com.cn/bloodymap directs visitors to two Google maps webpages, which mark places across China that are reportedly sites of land conflicts - some of them deadly. Clicking each mark opens a brief introduction about the dispute.
The "open version" of the map welcomes users to add and revise tags, while the "revised version" contains disputes that have been confirmed by media reports.
The blogger says he named the project "Bloody Map" after discussions with netizens. Marks on the map can be removed after news media report the conflicts resolved.
"Media coverage of and public attention to illegal land seizure disputes can gradually fade out, failing to provide a persistent deterrent to the phenomenon," the blogger told Xinhua. "So it is necessary to find a new way to express people's concerns and try to constrain the problem."
"I'm not conveying any information to the government. I just believe that a responsible citizen should do something for society," he said.
The latest incident, added to the confirmed version four days ago, revealed a conflict earlier this month in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in south China, where police cordoned off a village to force about 70 households, who had refused low government compensation, to leave.
Local media had reported that more than 90 percent of the 2,600 villagers had been relocated since 2007 after the local land-use authority launched a commercial development project.
Woman on the roof
Another tag reminds people of a woman who protested against a real estate developer that attempted to demolish her house with force in Yichang City, Hubei Province. Clad only in her underwear, the woman stood on the roof of a building on September 30 and her parents staged a sit-down protest on an adjacent street.
However, a publicity official of Yichang told Xinhua that the woman and the developer reached an agreement with government mediation on the day of the incident and the developer had compensated the woman. The official, who declined to be named, blamed the developer for failing to get approval from the home owner before starting the demolition, but he refused to disclose the content of the agreement or the amount of compensation.
The case had not been removed from the map yet as netizens still believed it should be "judged by time," said Bloody Map.
Other cases include people setting themselves alight, clashes between residents and real estate developers or leaders of local authorities, and other conflicts, some of which led to deaths or serious injuries.
Land acquisition and house demolition was a complicated issue involving the interests of developers, demolition companies, residents, local governments and other parties, so it was still impossible to rely just on the government or the market to resolve problems in a country where the judicial system was still unable to cover everything, said the blogger.
He urges people to "stop buying blood-stained apartments." He also calls on responsible real estate developers to curb brutal behavior.
The map focuses on a prominent social dispute at the center of China's urbanization drive, and reflects a growing civil society where people share a heightened sense of dignity and strong aspirations to participate in public affairs, said Chang Jian, vice director of the human rights research center of Tianjin-based Nankai University.
"Promoting urbanization in an active and stable manner," as stipulated in China's Five-Year Plan in 2001, was reiterated in the country's new roadmap of economic development unveiled last week.
The proposals for formulating the development plan for the next five years (2011-2015) approved by the Fifth Plenary Session of the 17th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee last Monday also stressed the significance of preparing for unexpected hardships and effectively resolving conflicts.
Land disputes often boil over when developers resort to violent means to remove reluctant home owners when compensation negotiations fail.
The problem could aggravate public discontent and trigger uproar, frustrating those who feel they are excluded and could even turn people against the government, an official with the government of Yichun City, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, told Xinhua.
The map will increase pressure on local authorities, prompting them to re-examine housing issues and living standards, said the official who only identified himself as Gao.
China had 420 million registered Internet users, whose right to freedom of speech was enshrined in the law, and the Internet was a key channel for the government to gauge public opinion, State Council Information Office director Wang Chen said at a human rights forum in Beijing last Wednesday.
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