By
JIM
YARDLEY
New York Times
BEIJING, Aug. 8 Beijing observed the
one-year countdown to the 2008 Olympics on Wednesday night with fireworks and
pageantry at a celebration in Tiananmen Square. A few blocks away, Sun Ruoyu and
her sister saw the streaks of color in the sky but did not dare leave their
battered home.
They were on a countdown of their own.
The
two-story building where Ms. Sun’s ancestors opened a bakery in the 1840s
their clientele included the Qing emperor and his court has been on
Beijing’s demolition list since Monday. Local officials have notified the Sun
family that the building is along the route of the Olympic marathon. Land is
needed for a beautification project. A bulldozer is parked
outside.
Demolition is not new in the surrounding Qianmen area, a
historic neighborhood being razed and rebuilt as a shopping district for the
Olympics. What is unique is that Ms. Sun is refusing to leave. She is the last
holdout on a street once lined with shops. Landscapers have already covered the
rest of the block with saplings and a sheet of green grass. Her building is an
unsightly stump marring the view.
“I’m just waiting for them to tear it
down,” Ms. Sun, 55, said during an interview Wednesday afternoon inside the
building. Her defiance is articulated on posters in English and Chinese that she
has affixed to her door. “This is illegal!” one poster declares. “I have to use
my life to protect our house!”
The official message of countdown week is
that Beijing is on schedule in preparing for the Games. Stadiums and sporting
venues are nearing completion. Crews are working to finish new subway lines and
roads.
Jacques
Rogge, president of the
International
Olympic Committee, told the Chinese state news media that preparations were
“truly impressive in every regard.”
Yet it is also true that to rebuild
itself into an Olympic city, Beijing has relocated untold numbers of residents,
often to make way for residential and commercial projects intended to give the
city a more modern, glamorous appearance. A recent study by a European research
institute estimated that 1.5 million people would be evicted or displaced in
Beijing by the opening of the Olympics a figure very difficult to verify.
If Beijing is not the first host city to move people, the scale of construction
around the city is still staggering.
Ms. Sun has tried with little
success to attract attention to her family’s case. Reports have circulated on
the Internet, but local newspapers have not touched it. Forced evictions are
politically sensitive in China; other cases of holdout homeowners have inflamed
nationwide public opinion and fueled anger over corruption. A term of art has
even arisen “nail house” for buildings whose owners refuse to move
even after neighboring buildings have been knocked down.
On Wednesday,
knots of people gathered outside Ms. Sun’s address, reading the posters and
official documents taped to the door. An Australian flag hung at the rear of the
building. Ms. Sun said she and her husband emigrated from Beijing to Melbourne
more than a decade ago and became Australian citizens.
Her father had
leased the building for many years, including to a state-owned grocery store,
before opening a restaurant there himself in 2001. Ms. Sun said the building was
famous as a bakery in Qianmen, an area that was known for its shops, provincial
guesthouses and brothels during the Qing Dynasty. In the spring of 2006, Ms. Sun
said notices appeared in the neighborhood that buildings would be razed. No
other explanation was provided, she said.
Months passed, and other
businesses along the block began to close. Then, early this spring, local
officials presented a notice explaining that the Sun family would have to move
in the name of slum clearance. The notice said that the city was preparing the
course of the Olympic marathon and that buildings in the area needed to be
demolished.
The notice concluded by thanking the family for supporting
the Beijing Olympics. Last Friday, another local official returned and posted a
notice declaring that the city reserved the right to demolish the building at
any time after Aug. 6, or Monday.
“They didn’t even talk to me,” Ms. Sun
said. When the bulldozer arrived on Wednesday morning, Ms. Sun greeted the
driver at the rear of the building. “I said, ‘You can’t dig here,’ ” she
recalled. “I climbed onto the bulldozer, and he stopped.”
Ms. Sun, who
returned to China this year, has sought help from the Australian Embassy. An
embassy staff member who advised Ms. Sun declined to comment on the case. But
Ms. Sun said she had been told by the embassy that it had little influence in
such matters and that she should seek a remedy in China’s legal system.
A
Chinese official involved in the case, reached by cellphone on Wednesday night,
refused to comment. Judging from the noise in the background, she appeared to be
attending the celebration at Tiananmen Square. At that ceremony, Liu Qi, the
president of Beijing’s Olympic organizing committee, repeated a slogan that he
said Beijing residents have embraced to prepare for the Olympics.
“I
participate, I contribute, I enjoy,” he said.
On Wednesday afternoon, as
Ms. Sun spoke to reporters inside her building, police officers interrupted the
interview three times. At one point, they demanded passports and journalist
identification cards. They later asked whether an article would be written about
the case and then left.
Ms. Sun believes that the Olympics are only one
reason that local officials want to knock down her home. She said one official
told her that the area would be made into a park for the Olympics but that it
would be developed later as a residential and commercial area. Officials have
offered the family about 1.6 million yuan, a little more than $200,000, for the
building not enough for what is expected to become one of the city’s
priciest districts. The family has refused.
“No matter what they offer, I
won’t be able to afford an apartment here,” she said. “I want to be able to live
here.”
She added: “They’ve used the Olympics to strip people of their
property. They’re doing things against the spirit of the Olympics.”
So,
for now, Ms. Sun and her sister, Ruonan, 56, are waiting. The downstairs
restaurant is closed. Demolition of adjacent buildings has caused so much
shaking that the walls are cracked.
The family has hired bodyguards to
protect the sisters as they sleep in the empty house at
night.
“Sometimes, I’m afraid they are coming for us,” Ms. Sun said.
“I’ll take a look out the window if I hear something.”