One household, one vote
Jul 12th 2007 JIUXIANQIAOFrom The Economist print edition
A novel approach to conflict-resolution
RETIRED workers who once made everything from nuclear-bomb components to wireless equipment are now living miserably in cockroach-infested slums in this corner of north-east Beijing. Many of them are also disgruntled with the compensation offered by developers who want to move them out. Disputes over relocation are rife across China, but this one is stirring a broader debate: about the meaning of democracy.
Dashanzi is a well-known trendy part of the capital, where avant-garde artists have set up studios in the abandoned factories that once formed the proud hub of China's military-electronics industry. Far less visited is Jiuxianqiao to its south, where the workers lived. Their blocks of flats, built by the Russians and East Germans in the 1950s, were once among the best in Beijing. These days, the 20,000 former workers and family members who still live in them mostly agree that housing in Beijing does not get much worse.
But they cannot agree on a common approach to the developer that wants to knock down their buildings and, reportedly, to build them new ones, as well as luxury-apartment blocks. The company will give them new flats free of charge, and cash to tide them over until these are built. Some residents say the offer is inadequate. Others, desperate to leave the cramped barrack-like buildings, where kitchens and lavatories are often shared between families, are happy to take it.
For the first reported time in the fractious history of China's recent urban makeover, residents on June 9th had a chance to vote on the offer. A month later state-owned newspapers are still poring over that event. Some called it a referendum, a term not used lightly in China. Under the Communist Party there should be no need for referendums since the party represents the will of the people. The party's dim view of this technique is evident in its dealings with Taiwan (see article).
Ba Changrui, deputy party chief of Jiuxianqiao, which includes the slums as well as Dashanzi and its now arty factories, says he is angry with the Chinese media for portraying this as a referendum. It was, he says, merely a way of canvassing public opinion. The result imposed no obligations on the developer. In any event, it was not clear-cut: 44.8% of households voted in favour of the offer and 22.4% against, and the rest did not vote at all. But Mr Ba's denials have not stopped a torrent of media comment, some of it pasted by residents on outdoor walls.
Many Jiuxianqiao residents are long-term tenants rather than owner-occupiers. A wave of property privatisation in the late 1990s passed the area by because of the difficulty of dealing with the shared facilities. Many press articles have nevertheless denounced the use of a referendum to decide the fate of individuals' private property. Property rights, argued one commentator, were a “core human right” that could not be taken away by democracy.
But as the Legal Daily noted this week, democracies could tamper with property rights by imposing taxes. And to say that a referendum was a tyranny of the majority was a misunderstanding. “Modern democracy also means protecting the minority,” it argued. Democracy can also be confusing. In Jiuxianqiao a simple majority has approved the developer's offer. But no one knows what to make of that. As those with more experience of ballots could have told them: voting is the easy part.
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