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Tuesday, 3 April 2007

No more island in the sun

Nailed down. Pulled out. Flattened. Demolished.

No matter how you want to describe it, the Chongqing nail house is no more. Today, the bulldozers came in and took the little house away. With this sudden turn of events, the three-year-long saga that has come to symbolise the private citizen's defiance against the Chinese government and illegal land grabs by developers has ended.

In the end, the owners of this two-storey brick house - perched 10 metres high on a tower of land in the middle of a huge construction pit - were compensated with a new up-market apartment worth about 3.0 million Yuan and given another 900,000 Yuan in special damages for the electricity and water that had been cut off by the developers. That's a very tidy sum, especially by Chinese standards.

Read my original post on this topic.

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