【中文标题】在中国的土地热潮中，权利经常遭到践踏
【原文标题】In China’s Land Rush, Rights Are Often Trampled
【登载媒体】纽约时报
【原文作者】MICHAEL WINES、JONATHAN ANSFIELD
【原文链接】http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/world/asia/27china.html?pagewanted=1
北京的老古城正在被拆除。
去年年底，中国的地产热潮引发了民众激烈的抗拒情绪，甚至媒体头条报道过被驱逐出自己家门的人发生自杀的事件。中国的政策制定者终于提出了一些解决方案，包括保护受未经审核的开发计划影响的居民，以及合理补偿拆迁损失。
今天的老古城是一片肮脏、密集的低层房屋和店铺，这里即将要在北京西部重建大方案中被改造。其改造后的成果可以从现场状况生动地体现出来：一家强势的开发商在新版拆迁条例发布之前拼命加快拆迁进度。600多位刚强的居民坚决拒绝搬走，直到他们拿到自己所期望的新条例可以提供的合理补偿。
49岁的田宏彦是坚守在这里的居民之一。围绕着自己被拆掉一半的房子转了一圈之后，他说：“现在是一个过渡期，在这个时候，我们看到越来越多的意外拆迁和野蛮拆迁在中国各地发生。”
中国并不具备一个可以发生Frank Capra传奇故事的大环境（译者注：弗兰克•卡普拉，最早移民美国实现自己梦想的成功者。二十世纪初，他从意大利到美国，先是派拉蒙,后是哥伦比亚公司，都因他的加盟而名声大噪。二战期间，他受马歇尔亲自委任拍摄了一部激励美国青年参军的大型纪录影片——《我们为何而战》。），但是普通民众还是可以对他们的独裁统治者施加影响力。房地产热潮让城市地区的房价飙升，老旧房屋价格下降，耕地被征用开发。高层官员担心，这股趋势用牺牲普通民众的代价滋养了地方政府和手眼通天的开发商。
类似老古城这样的抗议，以及全国各地所发生的自戕和对峙场面，迫使官员们至少要想办法，让没有合理补偿就可以攫取房产交给开发商变得不那么容易。国家名义上对土地拥有所有权，但这些土地都是由贫穷百姓在耕种或居住，没收这些土地的行为在过去20年里已经成为造成社会不安定的主要因素。
问题在于新法令会有多么严格，多久会出台，对缓和现状有多大帮助。至少，在老古城的居民看来，一个皆大欢喜的结局依然是那么遥远。
在这个国家的房地产热潮下，大批新城市和经过改造的旧城市浮出水面。同时，并非巧合，共产党赖以执政的经济基础也更加活跃。但是，收益的分配并不平均。
在北京，地方官员仅在今年就计划拆除50个像老古城这样的地区，目的大都是建造高层住宅和办公楼。这个计划会影响到超过18万居民，而且已经发生了几起恶性冲突事件。
各地推出的开发计划涉及的金额动辄上十亿美元。重庆在上个月公布的开发计划中显示，323个项目的总金额达到1万亿人民币（1464亿美元）。
当地政府用强有力的刺激方案来促销，他们控制着大部分土地，因此需要用土地创造的巨额利润来投资新项目。
中国最大的70个城市中，政府卖地收入在2009年激增了140％，达到1581亿美元。据半官方消息预计，这部分收入占据了当地政府总收入的60％，一些私人机构认为这个比例会更高。
受害者是普通居民，他们被赶出家门，得到的只是经过层层克扣的补偿金，而且缺少法律援助。漏洞百出的现存法律条款制定于2001年，让开发商有充分的自由度攫取土地，为己所用。
两年前，中国的立法机关人民代表大会批准了一项法律，强化个人的财产权利，并要求制定法律规范城市土地用途。但是这一进程停滞在了中国的内阁——国务院立法办公室。
北京大学法律学院副主任沈奎在一次采访中说：“他们遇到了来自利益集团的阻挠，包括政府内部人士和开发商。”
没有更新的法律制度，当地政府任意选择重建地点，把居民的沟通工作交给开发商、拆迁公司和更低级别的“拆迁安置办公室”。这些人常常使用虚低的房屋购买价格、断绝公共设施供应，甚至雇用流氓团伙等手段来恐吓房主出售房屋。
由于无力继续居住，也没有钱可以搬家，很多中国人不得不起来反抗。拒绝搬迁的房主在空旷的土地上像钉子一样坚持，这种所谓的“钉子户”比比皆是。同样普遍的还有腐败和渎职事件。
但是公众的愤怒仍然没能让政府有所行动，直到去年11月份。成都的工人当时在强拆一个服装工厂和几所住宅，他们发现房屋主人的前妻唐福珍站在房顶。唐女士在自己身上浇满汽油，并点燃。她的死引发了全国轰动。
不久之后，沈先生和他北京大学的4位法律教授同仁向人民代表大会递交了一份请愿书，请求彻底修改土地法律条款。据政府媒体报道，几天之后，国务院的官僚们不仅拿出尘封已久的计划开始重新修订土地法律，而且还邀请这些教授和其他人士在闭门会议中共同商议。
随着新提案的消息在全国传开，13000多人涌向国务院网站，在新法律条款下发表评论意见。在沈先生的北京办公室里，来自全国各地的请愿信件从案头堆到了地板上。
来自东南部城市福州的一对愤怒的父母说，当地官员要拆除一所新的小学，为商业中心区开辟场地。来自长江三角洲城市成都的一封请愿信说，开发商准备把一个有800多富人居住的别墅区推平，重新盖上新别墅。
沈先生暗下决心要让新的法律条款成为中国的法制突破点。最后一个版本中要求开发商的官员于房主协商，支付市面价格的房屋补偿款，在销售和重新安置细节问题确定之前停止拆迁。并且，有时候要得到三分之二房主的同意。该版本还禁止政府在没有明确的“公众利益”前提下暴力拆迁，这有些类似于美国的定罪程序。
法律与现实之间依然存在着巨大的鸿沟。目前这个草案只涉及了城市地产，然而在农村和城市郊区，当地政府通过把商业化的农村土地转化为城市土地的方式，攫取了巨额利润——甚至会达到原房屋价格的100倍。
王利明是人民大学的副校长，兼任立法委员会的顾问，他说：“政策在目前看来是关键的一步，但仅靠政策远远不够。”他和其他法律专家正在致力于编写有关土地征用和限制权力滥用的法律。
徐智勇主办了一个非盈利性的土地问题法律组织，他说，尽管当前的草案还有很多漏洞，“但是如果实施，还是可以取得一些成果的。”
所有这些都是建立在一个不确定的假设上。公众评论期已经在2月份停止，向来擅于暗箱运作的中国官僚机构一直对法案的进展闭口不谈。
一些学者说，中央政府的官员似乎在威胁社会稳定和遏制经济增长速度的问题上发生了分歧。政策制定者们也有可能预先被灌输了一些遏制地价上涨的方法，所以他们在等待价格平稳之后在发布新政策。
在过去的几年里，阻止新政策发布的声音依然强烈。沈先生最重要的法案草拟伙伴，北京大学法律教授王喜信说：“我们遇到的障碍和反对异常可怕，大部分都来自地方阶层。”
地方官员们似乎不大关心如何控制职权的滥用，而更关心如何安抚被他们驱逐出门的百姓。沈先生说，杭州是中国在2009年靠卖地获取收入最高的城市，在最近一次政府讨论会议中，当地官员“普遍担心遭到市民谴责”。但是，他们也告诉他，即使是新条例也让他们能够用模糊的“公众利益”借口来随意选择开发地点。
沈先生说：“他们实际上就是在说，该拆的还是要拆，主要问题是如何确保补偿方案的公平性。”
他和其他一些人一起指责，开发商和地方官员们在更加严格的政策实施之前充分利用这个空白期。社论主编仇峰上个月在北京新闻中说，当地政府“绞尽脑汁搭乘最后一班车，他们使用变本加厉的手段在更大的范围内进行拆迁和重新安置活动。”
尽管如此，改革的前景还是让濒于搬迁的人们重新焕发出力量，也让一些当地政府部门被迫做出了改变。
杭州和一些其它城市推出了一个“房子等人”的政策，政府官员和开发商可以立即把拆迁户安置到价格合理的房子中，然后再慢慢解决双方的争执。
4月中旬，北京在副市长牵头下组建了一个委员会，监控所有拆迁行为。今年，在偏远的两个村庄将实行一种新的补偿方案，让开发商和村民均沾拆迁利益。
但是，老古城尚未因此受益。
政府官员和开发商设定的3月20日最后期限已经过去了两个多月，1200名住户中还有一多半在此坚守，期望获得更好的安置条件。他们不受利诱、不受威胁，甚至流氓砸窗户的行为也没能让他们动摇。
去年12月份，北京大学的教授刚刚递交请愿书之后，数十名老古城的居民游行到区政府办公室，要求更合理的补偿方案。3月20日夜里，他们在一场温和、欢乐的示威中，在街边燃放焰火。
但是，当地官员和开发商都没能实现老古城居民的愿望。一位拆迁安置办公室的官员在电话中说：“他们以为新的政策出台之后，补偿方案会有所变化。”她只愿意透露自己的姓氏——李。
她说：“但实际上，公司已经通知他们，方案根本不会变化，因为项目已经开始了。”
原文：
The Laogucheng neighborhood in Beijing is being demolished.
BEIJING — When China’s land boom excited a frenzy of popular resistance late last year — including headline-grabbing suicides by people routed from their homes — Chinese policy makers finally proposed a solution: rules to protect citizens from unchecked development and to fairly compensate the evicted.
Today in Laogucheng, a dingy warren of apartments and shops slated for redevelopment on Beijing’s far west side, the fruits of that effort are on vivid display: a powerful developer is racing to demolish the neighborhood before the rules are passed. And about 600 gritty homeowners are adamantly refusing to move until they get the fair deal they hope the rules will provide.
“This is a limbo period,” Tian Hongyan, 49, one of Laogucheng’s holdouts, said after a stroll amid the rubble of his half-bulldozed neighborhood. “And during it, we’re seeing even more sudden and violent demolitions occur around the country.”
China is not a good setting for a Frank Capra tale, but people do have influence over their autocratic masters. Top officials are worried that the property rush — which leads to soaring prices for urban real estate and low prices for old homes and farmland seized for development — is enriching local governments and well-connected developers at the expense of ordinary people.
Protests like those in Laogucheng — including self-immolations and spectacular standoffs around the country — have forced officials to at least consider making it harder to seize property and turn it over to developers without fully compensating those who live on it or use it. Effective confiscation of land nominally owned by the state, but farmed or lived on by the poor, has been a major source of unrest for the past two decades.
The question is whether new rules will be tough enough, or come soon enough, to do much about it. At least for those living in Laogucheng, the chances of a happy ending still seem remote.
The country’s property boom has spawned new cities, remade older ones and — not incidentally — helped float the buoyant economy that is a bedrock of Communist Party legitimacy. But its benefits are spread unevenly.
In Beijing, local officials plan to demolish about 50 areas like Laogucheng this year alone, mainly to erect high-rise apartments and offices. That plan affects more than 180,000 residents, and has already set off several ugly clashes.
Redevelopment plans elsewhere total scores of billions of dollars: a single city, Chongqing, last month unveiled plans to invest one trillion renminbi ($146.4 billion) in 323 projects.
Local governments have powerful incentives to stoke sales, for they control much of the land, and need land profits more than ever to finance new projects.
In China’s 70 biggest cities, government land-sale revenues leaped 140 percent in 2009, to $158.1 billion. Land sales provide up to 60 percent of local government revenues, by one semiofficial estimate — and much more by some private ones.
The losers have been ordinary citizens, ousted from their homes with cut-rate compensation and scant legal recourse. The existing loophole-ridden land rules, dating from 2001, give developers wide leeway to clear property for their own use.
Two years ago, China’s appointed legislature, the National People’s Congress, approved a law to strengthen individual property rights and ordered new rules written to regulate urban land. But that effort stagnated in the legislative affairs office of the State Council, China’s cabinet.
“They face resistance from interest groups — from people in the government and from developers,” Shen Kui, the vice dean of Peking University’s law school, said in an interview.
Without updated rules, local governments pick renewal sites at will, then leave negotiations with residents to developers, demolition companies and low-level “demolition and relocation offices.” These frequently low-ball home-purchase offers, cut off utilities and even hire gangs of thugs to terrorize homeowners into selling.
Powerless to stay and too poor to move, many Chinese have rebelled. So-called nail houses — homes whose owners resist eviction, sticking out like spikes on tracts of cleared land — are common. So are tales of corruption and other abuses.
But public anger did not move the government to action until last November, when workers in the city of Chengdu came to raze a garment factory and home and found the owner’s former wife, Tang Fuzhen, atop its roof. After Ms. Tang doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire, her death created a national sensation.
Not much later, Mr. Shen and four fellow Peking University law professors dispatched a plea to the National People’s Congress to overhaul the land rules. The state press took note, and days later, State Council bureaucrats not only resurrected the long-stalled plans to write new land rules, but also invited the professors and others to weigh in at closed-door meetings.
As word of the proposal spread nationwide, more than 13,000 people flooded a State Council Web site with comments on the rules. In Mr. Shen’s office in Beijing, petitions from people around the country were piled from the floor to his desktop.
Angry parents wrote from Fuzhou, a southeastern city where officials were seizing a new primary school to make way for a new central business district. A plea arrived from Changshu, a Yangtze River delta city where developers sought to raze the villas of 800 relatively well-off homeowners, to make way for new villas.
Mr. Shen called the decision to finally write new rules a rare legal breakthrough. The latest draft requires developers and officials to consult homeowners, pay market rates for homes and put off demolition until sales and relocation details are settled — and, sometimes, approved by two-thirds of homeowners. It also would bar governments from forcibly seizing homes — in a process akin to condemnation in the United States — without specific “public interest” purposes.
Serious gaps remain. The draft covers only urban property, leaving out rural city outskirts where local governments have reaped massive profits — up to 100 times the value of a home — by converting commercially zoned countryside to city land.
“The regulation is one key step for now, but it’s not nearly enough,” said Wang Liming, a People’s University vice president and legal adviser to the legislature. He and other legal experts advocate new laws over land expropriations and planning to prevent abuses.
But despite the current draft’s loopholes, “if it’s really implemented, there will be some progress,” said Xu Zhiyong, who leads a nonprofit legal group that works on land issues.
It is a big if. Since the public comment period ended in February, China’s bureaucracy — always opaque at best — has been silent on the rules’ future.
Some scholars say central government officials appear torn between addressing a threat to stability and reining in an engine of economic growth. Regulators also could be preoccupied with other measures to curb land prices, they said, and waiting for prices to stabilize before issuing new rules.
And as in past years, lobbying against the new measures remains intense. “The obstruction and opposition is quite formidable,” said Mr. Shen’s principal co-drafter, a Peking University law professor, Wang Xixin. “Much of it derives from the local levels.”
For their part, local officials seem less concerned about reining in abuses than about mollifying those they evict. In Hangzhou, the Chinese city that made the most money from land sales last year, officials at a recent government forum “naturally were very worried about being condemned by citizens,” Mr. Shen said. But they also told him that even new regulations would allow them to designate land for redevelopment under a vague “public interest” clause.
“They basically said that what needed to be demolished would still be demolished,” Mr. Shen said. “The main issue for them was how to carry out equitable compensation.”
He and others charge that developers and officials are seizing the moment before tougher regulations are imposed. Qiu Feng, an editorial writer, said in The Beijing News last month that local governments were “clinging to the mentality of catching the last bus, using even cruder means to organize demolition and relocation on an even greater scale.”
Still, the prospects of reform have energized people on the brink of eviction, and pressured at least some local governments into making changes.
Cities like Hangzhou are introducing a policy of “homes waiting for people,” so that officials and developers can immediately resettle the displaced in affordable housing, regardless of outstanding disputes.
In mid-April, Beijing formed a committee under a vice mayor to supervise all demolitions. Moreover, two outlying villages scheduled for urbanization this year will provide tests for a new program to share revenues from the developments with villagers.
But not Laogucheng.
More than two months past the March 20 deadline set by local officials and developers, more than half of its 1,200 homeowners are hanging on for a better settlement, impervious to cajoling, threats, and even assaults by window-smashing thugs.
Last December, just after the Peking University professors publicized their appeal, dozens of Laoguchengers marched to city and district government offices, demanding a fairer deal. In a more convivial protest, they lit fireworks in the crumbling alleyways the night of March 20.
But neither local officials nor developers want to fan Laogucheng’s hopes. “They think when the new regulation comes up, the relocation plan will change,” an official answering the phone at the local demolition and relocation office, who gave only her surname, Li, said this month.
“But in fact, the company has been informing them that the relocation plan won’t change at all,” she said. “Because this project has already begun.” |
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发表于 2010-6-4 11:11
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发表于 2010-6-4 13:06
