Qi Yueying, 49, is digging in her heels amid a stand-off with municipal authorities over the demolition of a historic family farmhouse that lies just beyond the southeastern part of Beijing's Second Ring Road. Police officers and security guards maintain a constant presence outside her home. Whenever she wants to run an errand, she must first call the local police station to get permission to leave her house. Qi refuses to accept the compensation offered for the farmhouse, saying it's a tenth of its value. She says the government is ignoring its own regulations, because she has studied land and compensation policy for seven years. Despite being detained three times, Qi remains defiant.
Tell me about yourself.
I left a rural town in Shijiazhuang in Hebei after divorcing my first husband, and arrived in Beijing with my two children in 1990. I sell clothes for a living, and that's how I met my current husband. His father owns a large, old farmhouse near the Guangming Bridge just beyond the southeastern part of Beijing's Second Ring Road. There were about 5,400 households in the area before it was marked for a government-backed demolition in December 2004. But the work initially made little progress because people were unhappy about the compensation offered.
What was the offer?
We were offered about 4,500 yuan per square metre, which grossly undervalued our property. And even worse, demolition authorities in Chaoyang district refused to compensate us for more than 800 square metres of private land our family owns, or for about 40 units we built before the 1980s that added to the original seven units. A survey firm hired by district officials in 2010 found we were entitled to compensation for 109 square metres, or about 1.22 million yuan (HK$1.49 million). My husband, my children and I have somewhere else we can go, but my two brothers-in-law and their families don't because the compensation is barely enough to buy a one-bedroom home at current market prices.
You actually own the land?
Yes. We have a photocopy of a land certificate the government issued in 1951 that states we own the original seven units on a plot of land measuring 830 square metres. The original certificate was handed over to the government during the Cultural Revolution, but we have never been stripped of ownership of the land. Even the government surveyor's report in 2010 acknowledged we own more than 500 square metres of land, though I do not know how they came up with that figure. It is a misconception that homeowners on the mainland can't own the land on which their homes are built. So why aren't we being offered compensation for the land? Why were we offered only 4,500 yuan per square metre for a home that could fetch between 40,000 yuan and 50,000 yuan a square metre on the market?
