expulsion

Evicting tenants by loudspeaker

Sophie Team Observers — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:49:30 +0100

Imagine receiving threats all day long, through a loudspeaker. That's daily life for residents of a town in northeast China, where the authorities are trying everything to get rid of them.

In need of moving them out before demolition, the Shenyang authorities chose to bombard remaining residents with endless announcements over loudspeaker. For almost a year the crackly threats have been echoing around the district of Nanta. Webusers from the neighbourhood vent their frustrations online.

This video was filmed in October and posted on YouTube with the subtitles by BetterChina along with this comment:

I think this loudspeaker business is still going on and will be going on for a long time - until the tenants give in or the authorities run out of patience and end up simply knocking everything down.

It's a snapshot of life in China, life under an oppressive government, where the rights of the people have no protection. The Chinese are accustomed to things people in other countries would find awful. The government can treat people how they like, and no one can do anything about it."

We weren't able to confirm if the loudspeakers are still being used.

Web user captures expulsion on film

Sophie Team Observers — Fri, 30 May 2008 10:34:38 +0200

We've already published several posts - here and here - about the authorities expelling people from their homes around China in the name of "housing redevelopment". Here, a new amateur video found by one of our Observers in China.

Chinese petitioners, driven out of Beijing, take refuge online

Zhang — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 13:55:00 +0200

Material compiled by Zhang, our editor for the Chinese region

For hundreds of years the central authority in China has allowed citizens to file a petition if they feel a local official has wronged them. The citizen must go to Peking to ask for reparations related to expropriation, police brutality, and unjust verdicts, or to denounce corruption. Over the years, these thousands of dissatisfied people have formed a village in an area south of the capital, where they live sparsely, while waiting their case to be heard by the petition office. Some people have been waiting for over ten years. However, the day before the seventeenth congress of the Communist Party, the authorities decided to get rid of the petitioners. On 12 October, police forces entered the petitioner village and expelled all its inhabitants. Now, keeping in mind the ancestral tradition of petitions, some petitioners use the Internet to air their grievances. For example...

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