ONE of my high school classmates perfectly fits the description of what is now referred to as "second-generation rich people."

The son of a super-rich businessman, he drove a Mercedes when working part-time at a McDonald's when studying in Britain for an MBA.

The stark contrast between the humble job and his flamboyance stunned the poor South Asian students working there for low wages.

It was the wackiest story I'd heard about a luxury car used for an irrelevant purpose, that is, until it was reported recently that some farmers-turned-urbanites in Beijing started driving BMWs either as unlicensed taxis or to work as sanitation cleaners.

This absurdly ostentatious lifestyle has an unlikely financier: relocation money.

As part of Beijing's plan to extend the urban sprawl, Dawangjing Village on the city's fringe, home to 1,700 households, had been planned for demolition from May 2009. The relative ease of the supposedly messy relocation - finished in only 53 days - stemmed from the fact that all the households were handsomely compensated.

Average compensation ranged from 3 million yuan (US$450,150) to 6 million yuan per family, while some owning multiple homes received packages to the tune of tens of millions of yuan. No case of forcible demolition or petitioning was recorded.

But after the villagers moved into urban flats, complete with amenities only dreamed of in their former residences, happiness began to turn sour.

CCTV reported on November 23 that the rags to riches story took an unexpected turn as the windfall drove a wedge between family members and sparked an identity crisis.

The report quoted a resident surnamed Wang as saying that financial lawsuits between relatives had totaled over a hundred. Many couples split over money; Mothers went to court against daughters; Sisters were engaged in rancorous litigation. The surge of domestic strife had debilitated some people's health and contributed to a quadrupling of the death rate among former Dawangjing villagers.

Lost land

What's more, some had difficulty adapting to their new life in the city. Sitting on a huge pile of cash, they no longer needed to soil their hands to survive. Farming, the only thing they were good at, became a lost craft.

They idled away their time at mahjong tables and quickly squandered the windfall through gambling, the report said.

The irrational purchases suggest that the villagers need to be counseled on money management after becoming "rich" overnight, some social critics said, adding that morality needs to be stressed to curb over-spending.

As if it were the case.

In fact, by asking the newly prosperous villagers to stay on the straight and narrow and not asking why they consumed this much, the critics are missing the point. As People's Daily opined in a November 29 commentary, the villagers' bewilderment is caused not so much by the astoundingly huge amount of money as by their accumulated anger at the yawning wealth gap, which found an outlet through splurging whatever bounty that came their way.

Dawangjing's villagers used to languish in neglect on the periphery of a metropolis that's physically near but psychologically distant.

They had lived in squat and fetid shantytowns, inhaling foul-smelling air and worrying about security all the time. Hence when their dormant lust for lucre was awakened, it erupted like a volcano, People's Daily said.

As the precondition for acquiring the status of city dwellers, villagers had to give up the land they had relied on for generations for the food that grew on it and benefits that accrued from it - a big trade-off that critics conveniently ignored.

Columnist Liu Hongbo wrote in the Oriental Morning Post on November 24 that popular criticism of the villagers' excessive consumption reflects a condescending attitude toward those who become unsustainably "rich" in a way many don't approve of.

And Dawangjing is an exception, not the rule. Nationwide, tragedies triggered by forcible demolition far outnumber such "Slumdog Millionaire" sagas.

To come clean about the charge that they will stop at nothing to boost their career prospects, officials need to stop bankrolling thugs to terrorize people and pulverize their homes.

The latest known victim of demolition violence is Meng Fugui, a resident of Guzhai Village in the Shanxi Province capital of Taiyuan.

He was beaten to death on October 30 while asleep in his own house by a dozen thugs, apparently hired by the local government to make relocation "smooth," the Oriental Outlook magazine reported on November 29.

While carrots instead of sticks were used to displace Dawangjing's residents, losing the land means losing livelihood and direction in life altogether.

Officials certainly didn't envision the consequence when they touted the benefits of starting life anew in the city.

Their unwillingness to keep up the good will toward the villagers after they were herded into apartment buildings reveals the hypocrisy of their so-called magnanimity.

Land seizures and resettlement of city dwellers are no better. Most are shunted to suburban areas, sometimes even to places that jeopardize their health.

It took years for grateful "beneficiaries" of an affordable housing project in Wuhan to expose the shenanigan pulled upon them. Residents at a riverfront complex in the capital of Hubei Province were astonished to learn recently that their homes, built in 2009, sat on the site of a chemical plant and that this ugly fact was withheld from them at the time of purchase, the Beijing News reported on November 30.

Poisoned soil

Ironically, the complex, big enough to accommodate 2,400 households, was the first of it kind in Hubei to have received awards from both provincial and national authorities as a "model project for an ethical building code."

Although the authorities have ordered a cleanup of the poisoned soil, this had only a limited effect in allaying the residents' concerns about the heavily polluted environment.

Officials who hid the fact and gave the green light to the flawed project are now coming under fire.

This stonewalling suggests that officials have acted in cahoots with the developers to suppress the environmental assessment report, required by the environmental watchdog before apartments could go on sale.

In this way, they both got what they wanted. For developers it was sales, while the government would be commended for "caring about the people's welfare," said an article on People's Daily's Website on December 1.

While the future of the complex hangs in the balance - with some calling for its demolition - the public deserves a thorough explanation, rather than a compromised one as has been seen in similar cases.

This will happen only when officials are held to account for their betrayal of those who vest power in them.