Shadowing Practice: China's competition for living space | DW Documentary - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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China's cities are growing at a breathtaking pace.
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Mega metropolises with glittering facades for the ultra-rich.
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What the major cities really want, the way they're thinking, is to have the high-end, if we call them the high-end population.
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More and more Chinese are moving from the country to the city.
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But beyond the shiny high-rises, the streets are narrow, loud and dirty.
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There is no regulation or law in China that protects tenant rights.
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Homeowners are expropriated, forced to yield to the construction boom.
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Building space is in high demand.
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Those left behind have no legal recourse.
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They become desperate.
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My house is gone, torn down, everything's gone.
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China's struggle for living space.
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Li Qijong is ready to defend his home to the last.
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China as such does not have a particularly dense population, but its sprawling urban agglomerations do.
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Cities with millions of inhabitants are practically sprouting up overnight.
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Megacities, modern, glamorous and full of superlatives.
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In 1980, 20% of China's population lived in cities.
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Today, that figure has risen to 60%, over 800 million people.
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No country in the world has as many large cities with over one million inhabitants.
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China has more than 100.
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Experts expect that figure to double in just a few years.
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German architect Erks Schafartzik moved to China as its boom was well underway.
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He has lived and worked here for 11 years.
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Of course, everyone thinks you can find your fortune in the biggest cities cities.
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Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, that's where the big money is.
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It's part of the Chinese dream to live and work in the big, dazzling cities.
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But most of the former rural residents looking for work can't afford to do so.
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Millions of them are constantly on the move as migrant workers.
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Which is sad, because there's not just a few of them, but several hundred million.
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I don't know the exact number, but about two or three hundred million people, maybe more, are constantly wandering from one place to the next to make money because they can't at home.
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There they could only work in the fields.
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And even that isn't so easy anymore because so much land is so contaminated, it's become completely infertile and then nothing will grow.
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a month in 2017, making a city apartment way beyond his means.
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Author David Bandersky has lived in Hong Kong for 14 years.
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He has witnessed the social upheaval across China from up close.
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They can't afford these new apartments that are built.
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These very rapidly, by the 90s, were becoming really expensive
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and you needed to have a proper job and a proper work permit, etc., to even be able to buy property.
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So they were rural people living and working in the city, and it was natural for them to look for spaces that accepted them.
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This is where migrant and low-income workers can afford to live, in China's so-called urban villages.
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Formerly real villages surrounded by fields, today they are surrounded by the city.
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No glitter, no glass facades, but affordable.
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Places that mostly remain hidden from tourists' curious gaze.
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And that's a village, just a tight urban space, almost like a large city block, just packed with migrants.
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At the heart of the megacity Shenzhen, we managed to film one of these poor neighborhoods.
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Here, people live in cramped quarters under the most difficult conditions.
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Filming is not officially allowed.
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We weren't granted permission to capture the dark side of China's economic boom.
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If you're renting a room in a very central village, it might be more than one on the outskirts, but you could find a room, maybe a share, and you'd pay 200,
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300, maybe 500 renminbi per month, 40, 50 euros or something like that.
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50 euros for a place to sleep in a dorm, compared to 620 for an entire apartment.
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We want to learn more about the living conditions for the residents here.
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Ms. Lee shows us her apartment.
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She and her husband and daughter share 7 square meters.
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Although she and her husband both have jobs, they can't afford anything larger.
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At least they have a window.
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That's not always the case.
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They have to pay for electricity, water, even school.
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Life in the city is expensive.
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The room costs 100 euros per month.
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A home outside the urban village is out of the question.
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Other residents also show us their spaces.
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Although we try to be as inconspicuous as possible, we get caught several times.
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No cameras allowed.
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We stop filming.
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China is a surveillance state, but the police can't be everywhere.
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But in these poor areas, we stand out as foreigners all the more.
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Professor for Architecture, Zhu An Du, works at Hong Kong University.
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She specialises in large metropolitan areas and urban villages villages.
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There are urban villages in every single city in China, every single city.
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Some have hundreds, some have thousands, some have a handful.
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For decades, the Chinese government has considered urban villages to be eyesores that hindered progress and modernization.
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They were to vanish from the cityscape and make room for the a new,
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modern way of living.
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Make room for skyscrapers and shopping malls, so urgently needed that the urban villages are to make way for them. And the residents?
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They hardly put up any resistance.
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They know there is little point in standing up to the government, so they pack up what little they own and move on.
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Most of the reasons why a government would want to be
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part of a demolition process to demolish an urban village is
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because either the government or developer deems there's much better and more valuable use for that land.
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Municipal governments say the inhabitants of the urban villages should vacate their voluntarily and not stand in the way of potential investors.
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Severance payments often make it easier to let go.
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But those who still refuse to leave are put under massive pressure.
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We learned what that meant in Guangzhou in 2012.
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Amidst a rubble field marking a former urban village, we met Li Jie.
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She had been arrested for not abandoning her home.
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He told me to write a confession.
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I was so scared and I don't write well.
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I told him I couldn't write.
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Then a fellow prisoner wrote something for me.
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This, here.
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She told me it was my official objection to the demolition of the house.
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I was very frightened.
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I was confused.
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I just wanted to get out.
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Even death would have been better.
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The police were so cruel.
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They had stun guns.
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I was terrified.
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That's why I just signed.
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I signed and they let me go.
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Writer and researcher David Bandersky knows many cases like Li Jie's.
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He was in Guangzhou himself in 2012.
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You can see in many cases like this, you can see the absolute desperation.
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And it varies from village to village, but many people are in this case.
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They have nowhere to go, there's no future for them, no pensions, no place to live.
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Their community is gone, and they feel just desperate." With her forced signature, Li Jie, who can neither read nor write,
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formally agreed to the demolition of her home.
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She received no compensation, and her signature unwittingly waived any later claim to it. So here I am.
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I stay with one person one day, someone else the next.
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What can I do?
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My house is gone.
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Torn down.
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Everything is gone.
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Now all I can do is hang around here.
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What else is there to do?
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It's as if they wanted me dead.
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The day after, Li Jie jumped off the roof of a building and killed herself.
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A lot of people are jumping off apartment towers.
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If you've lived in the same place for sometimes more than six generations, then it's hard to comprehend when one day someone shows up and says, it's over and you have to leave,
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or you're no longer welcome, that you have to make way for something else, a highway or an Olympic stadium or just another high-rise.
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These developments were particularly extreme in Shenzhen. In 1980, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping proclaimed one of China's first special economic
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zones in what was then a small town of just under 59,000 inhabitants.
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Between 1980 and 2010, according to a UN report, Shenzhen was the fastest growing city in human history.
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The city devoured the neighboring farmland and engulfed entire villages.
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Today, official figures say Shenzhen has over 12 million inhabitants.
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In reality, it's probably more than 16 in 2016.
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Surrounding agricultural areas are still being rezoned as building land by decree.
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The urban villages within the city are also expected to make way for lucrative new buildings.
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A law was passed from the central government.
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All village land inside a certain vicinity now become nationally owned,
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meaning the land is no longer owned by the villages, they're owned by the government.
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So this is done by a law, by national law.
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So you cannot say it's illegal, you could say it's the legality or the correctness of that law,
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we can argue, but it's a national law.
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So therefore the villagers found themselves overnight not owning the land."
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This government decree in the 1990s stated that agricultural land belonged to the state.
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The farmers tilling the land had no other option than to give in to the state's wishes.
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To turn land into money.
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They transferred the land from collective land, which is rural land, and belongs to the collective of the community,
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and they transfer it into basically state-owned land, state-use land, which means it can be developed.
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And then they basically auction off the land often to private developers, or state-linked often state-owned developers,
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big companies, that then build apartments and infrastructure and this kind of thing.
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In the end, all the farmers were left with were their houses in the village centre.
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Under Chinese law, these belonged to the collective of all villages, and as such cannot be expropriated as easily.
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The villagers living in these local villages in the city, the urban villages, recognized a huge economic opportunity.
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I will take my one or two-storey apartment on my plot of collective land and I will build it to seven,
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eight stories, as much real estate as I can get, right?
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And I will rent it to migrant families or individual migrants coming in.
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And so this is what happened.
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They became landlords.
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The farmers, deprived of their fields, had to find creative ways to make money.
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They built their houses as cheaply and efficiently as possible, as high as the foundations would carry.
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It's still common practice today.
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And there's even a word in China, the word for farming is zhongdi, to farm the land.
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And they talk about zhongfang, to farm a home, to farm a house.
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The new landlords have to build up this haphazard living space
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quickly to be able to rent it out as soon as possible.
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Building regulations, like those the glittering modern palaces must adhere to, have no bearing here.
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It's true that when you go into these urban villages often it's very dark.
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The electrical grid is basically all jerry-rigged.
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You have wires just crossing each other.
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They look like spider webs in this kind of almost cave-like environment.
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The reason for this cave-like environment is because on the first floor they build a certain level.
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There may be three meters between the buildings as a kind of loose regulation, right?
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They can't be too close together.
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You need some some access for fire vehicles if you need them.
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And then the second level they build in because they want to maximize the space, the floor space to rent.
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More square footage or square meters means more income.
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So you get this kind of compression of the space until
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when you're in the bottom level
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and you look up it's just a crack of sunlight
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and they call this yixian tian or a line of sky in Chinese.
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It's almost like seeing light under a closed door.
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It's just a little bit.
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And so imagine that and you have open sewers, these kind of burbling open sewers that smell like sewage.
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So I think a lot of people walking into the space would say, yeah, this is unacceptable for urban living.
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We are in the urban village of Bai Shizhou.
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Once again, we have no permit to shoot.
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It's loud and stifling.
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The humid air condenses on the sides of the buildings.
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The houses are overcrowded, and the narrow dark alleys reek of old food, mould and urine.
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Many of the buildings don't have working toilets.
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Running water or a washing machine are luxuries hardly anyone here can afford.
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The urban villages are scattered throughout the inner cities of China's major cities.
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Their inhabitants paid the price for their country's boom, and they're reminded of that every day.
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Even by those who are less unfortunate.
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In China, even in a city like Shenzhen, the prevalent public image is that they're all dirty, they're all unsanitary, they're all bad.
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That is the public image.
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The low-wage workers who live here are major contributors to the city's economic flourishing.
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Yet even so, they are a thorn in the side of the government.
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They want to build profitable apartment buildings there, and they want to sell the land for a lot of money to developers,
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because this is a primary source of revenue still for many cities in China.
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It's not tax revenue, income tax, it's revenue from land sales.
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Huge profits are to be had in the property and housing market in major Chinese cities.
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By the summer of 2019, average property prices in Shenzhen had skyrocketed compared to ten years earlier.
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In Beijing, they also rose sharply.
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Land for construction is becoming increasingly scarce, and anyone who snaps it up cheap can expect a hefty profit.
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This creates a situation where the city is determined to get the land of the villagers
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and they don't want to pay a fair price for that land.
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They want it cheap so they can sell it at a profit to the developers.
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All over the country, the government forces urban villages to give way to new construction projects in the name of progress.
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Local protest is mostly in vain.
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Police, city administrations and building contractors form a powerful alliance, something the public shouldn't be aware of.
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The land is not owned by individual villagers, the land is collected and owned by the village.
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So what that means is that the village collective, in some cases a handful of elderly men,
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hold a lot of power in negotiation.
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So most of the times when it is a negotiation between a developer or government about the fate of certain villages,
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they are not going to all the villagers, they're going to say the representatives of the village, which usually is the village elders, the village collective.
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The villagers are at the mercy of their representatives' negotiating skills, and they don't always act in the best interest of the community.
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Again and again, negotiations take place completely behind the backs of the homeowners concerned.
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There's been examples where the villagers had no idea
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that the head of the village collective company have signed an agreement with a developer to sell their village,
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and they took the money and left China.
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In recent years, hundreds of thousands have been forced out of their homes in urban villages.
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Only few dare to take a stand.
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One of them is Li Qijong in Guangzhou.
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He is pitted against the city administration and a powerful contractor.
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His family has lived in the urban village of Yangji for generations.
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Once, it was a farming village with 3,000 inhabitants.
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Now, it has become home to over 70,000 migrant workers in the middle of the financial district of Guangzhou.
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Why are they tearing it down so early at 6 a.m.?
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Because they want to do it in secret.
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We first met Li, his wife and two children, in 2012.
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They are the last remaining residents in their building.
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Not long ago, 50 people shared the same roof.
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They had come to the city from the countryside in the hope of a better life.
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Li Qijion's family has owned the house and the surrounding plot of land for generations.
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He has documents to prove it.
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This is a title deed from the 32nd year of the Republic of China. That would be 1943.
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in the eighth month of the moon, 70 years ago.
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Seventy years!
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Older than the Communist Party, older than the People's Republic of China.
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This document is not just a title deed.
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It also shows that Li is officially a rural citizen, with fewer rights in the city.
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So China has a system of what's called household registration,
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where the people are actually registered to their either urban or rural area of usually birth.
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The system dates to the 1950s.
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At that time, every household had to make a decision.
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Rural meant that they were entitled to a plot of land for subsistence farming.
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Urban guaranteed a workplace, subsidised housing, access to education and healthcare, and a pension.
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Legally speaking, Li Qi-jong is a rural resident.
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Outside the urban village he lives in, he has no right to use public services, unless he manages to buy an apartment in the city.
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But until you purchase a property in a city, you cannot get your local registration card, what's called a hukou.
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You just do not have local registration, which means it's almost It's impossible to get into local schools.
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Your kid will not have a school.
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And you won't have access to health care.
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Fair compensation for the house would help ease the family's desperate financial situation.
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They could stay in the city, buy an apartment, register and find work.
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This is what Li Jijong wants.
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But neither the city administration nor the building contractor will hear anything of it.
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But he won't back down.
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He's agreed to let us film his struggle.
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That night, the utility lines to his house are cut off.
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They cut the power.
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Here come the police.
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But that won't stop them.
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No one expects any help from the police.
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The family is forced to improvise.
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Water is only available at the edge of what has become a desert of rubble.
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To get there, they have to run a gauntlet of angry construction workers.
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A generator supplies the family with electricity.
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Lee is always on guard and hasn't left the house for months for months.
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He's heard of cases where construction workers have been quick to deal with residents like him, and that scares him.
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But he wants to hold out until the end for himself and for his family.
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And this is why you have the whole phenomenon of what we call nail houses, or in Chinese, dingzi hu.
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Individual landowners, property owners, if we call them owners, villagers who decide they're going to stay in their property,
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that they're going to hold out
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and wait for proper compensation by going head to head with the local property company and city leaders.
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And they stay there.
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They call them nail houses because they're like nails that can't be pulled out.
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There are hundreds of nail houses in China.
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Some of them have even made the front pages of international newspapers.
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A sign of protest that is usually broken at some point.
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The chances of winning the battle are slim.
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The other side is too powerful, and people evicted from their homes are often injured in the process.
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Li Qi-Zhong knows this and is gearing up, as if for battle.
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You can throw that out the window.
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It has a brick as an anchor.
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Then I can light the fuse and run away.
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Lee Chijong has prepared enough homemade explosives to bring it all down.
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If anyone gets in, they won't make it out alive.
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He films himself as he places them throughout the building.
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This is for the stairs one floor down, the second floor.
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The entrance stairs.
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That one there is for the rooms on the ground floor.
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This connects the gas to the room.
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The entrance stairs.
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That one there is for the rooms on the ground floor.
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This connects the gas to the roof.
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The bombs on the roof, here and here.
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Everything is labeled.
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If you're going to do it, you have to do it right.
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So, the individual nailhauser who basically arms his six-story building as
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an explosive device ready to go off as soon as his home is invaded,
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is only the mirror image of the violent city government that's in cahoots with the property developer
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that will cut your electrical lines and beat up your relatives and harass your kids on the way to school.
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The tactics aren't very different on either side.
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Both sides are resorting to violence and the threat of violence to get what they want.
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It's the law of the jungle." Li Qi-Jean's resistance has put the construction work months behind schedule.
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Tension is rising at the building site.
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The bosses pass their frustration on to their employees.
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If nothing gets built, no one gets paid.
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The first workers lose their patience and attack a former neighbour.
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Li Qi-Jean, stuck in his own home, can't come to her aid.
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The police arrive, but don't intervene.
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You police are all crooks.
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Nothing but small-time crooks.
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The big crooks are the corrupt officials.
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You just represent the government.
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You only say whatever the government tells you to.
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I tell the truth.
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Go ahead and write me up.
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Charge me with whatever you want.
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I've already been to court.
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You only act in the interest of the government.
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Your job is to defend the law, but you don't." Officially, all homeowners in the village have received generous compensation.
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Li Qijong denies this and speaks of corrupt officials embezzling funds.
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Sure, the government has paid out money, he says, but it doesn't seem to care who gets it.
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There are lots of examples of corruption in the area, including the government would provide a certain amount per month, a certain number of yen per person,
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per resident of the village, per month for a period of three years, for example, from loss of livelihood as they took farmland, right, because this was a source of livelihood.
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And I had documents at the time that were provided by people to me
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that would show that basically the head of the village had overreported the number of villagers eligible.
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So you look at the kind of roster of the population of the village
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and what was reported to city authorities with all the stamps from the county level,
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from this office, from everyone who were probably involved to overreport the amount of compensation that was due.
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Where did the compensation go?
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For years, corruption has been one of China's most serious problems, and the government is determined to tackle it.
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It seems to have spread everywhere, even into the housing market.
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If you speak to the majority of people in a city like Shenzhen, they would say the villagers have hit the lottery.
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that most of the villagers, in exchange for the land or their building,
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did receive an enormous amount of money.
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Li Qijong swears he has yet to see a single yuan.
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But after months of psychological warfare, he has given way a little.
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His wife and two children have moved into a small one-room apartment in another urban village that's still standing.
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From now on, Li Qi-Zhong is on his own.
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He's not sure if he will ever see his family again.
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The only thing he's certain of is that the construction workers will continue to pressure him, if need be, with force.
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It's a huge, it's a huge problem, because they learn from the system that violence is what solves the problem.
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They're not going to die!
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Each night we watch as the construction companies send out another gang of hooligans.
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They throw rocks at the windows and make sure the few remaining residents can't find any rest.
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As soon as the thugs disappear, the police surface.
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As long as the thugs stay, the police never show up.
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It's been over 60 weeks, and Li Qijong is completely worn out.
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Sleep is out of the question.
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The risk is too great that he might miss an attack and not be able to defend himself.
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I don't know if it's day or night.
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The construction company thugs usually attack after midnight.
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They smash windows, bang on doors.
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It's constant chaos.
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They put us nail house residents under such enormous pressure.
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It's past midnight now.
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I'd guess four in the morning.
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They'll probably strike again around five o'clock.
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I guess four in the morning.
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They'll probably strike again around five o'clock.
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I guess four in the morning.
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He feels condemned to sit and wait.
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For months he's defended his home like a fortress.
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The broken windows are closed off with metal rods and wooden boards.
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Hardly any daylight gets in.
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In his previous life, Lee was a simple worker.
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Now he's facing down a huge enemy in a war of attrition.
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You know, stability is used as a justification in going after these resisting villagers.
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They're seen as dangers, right?
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But the upshot of this kind of conflict, I think, is a real instability.
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The fact that they can't protect the rights of these villagers in a systematic and fair way.
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Li Qizhong's situation became desperate in 2013, after more than a year of conflict.
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One morning, a demolition company arrived with heavy equipment.
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Lee used the camera we gave him to document what was happening to the residents of the nail house.
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When he couldn't think of anything else to do, he dialed the number of the citizens' hotline.
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The city says that you are trying to get a very cruel situation.
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I want to make sure that you are taking a step to the right place.
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You can't stop the right place.
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Yes, Mr. Kauai.
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Our city says that We are still in the right place.
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We are in the city of Rangkei Chuan.
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There is a part of the city.
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You heard the sound?
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You still need to write.
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Please help me to turn 111.
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You can turn 111.
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You can turn 111.
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You can turn 111. Because I call 111.
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The police are still in the middle.
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Now, the house is like this.
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Now, you still need to write.
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I'm going to go to the house.
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The situation threatens to spiral out of control.
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We retreat to safety.
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The construction workers force their way into the nail houses, intent on beating Li Qi-jong and his last remaining neighbours out of the house.
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Technically that's against the law, so they try to do it as quickly and quietly as possible.
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But the men fight back and detonate their self-made explosives.
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They're loud and anything but subtle.
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I'm going to go.
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The noise caused by the explosive devices and Li's loud cries make the thugs call off their attack.
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Li Qizhong's stubborn battle might be an exception to the rule, but he's not the only one.
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All over China, protests against the demolition of the urban villages have been growing for more than ten years.
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The demonstrators often wear the red hats that signify membership in the ruling Communist Party.
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Who would dare use violence against them?
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Their protest attracts attention, both abroad and in China itself.
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This collective community was basically turning to collective action, and not even just that, village after village, but village to village.
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Villages linking with other villages that were facing similar problems, sharing information about how to protest, what are the effective ways,
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what are the legal ways, what are the sort of, you know, in terms of protest or or petitioning, you know, how does it work, what's effective.
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Ultimately, Li Qijong succeeded.
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In his case, his loud protest led to an amicable settlement.
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The construction company finally offered him a sum that he could accept.
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He won't say how much.
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But his struggle left behind scars.
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To this day, Li lives in constant fear of revenge.
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What's the knife for?
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What if they come after me?
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What would I do without it?
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I can't defend myself unarmed.
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Yes, but those knives...
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I'm ready if they attack me.
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They'll pay for it.
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That's what you think.
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No chance without a knife.
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Hu Juntao was president of the People's Republic of China for 10 years.
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Xi Jinping became his successor in March 2013.
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He announced he would take more decisive action against corruption.
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And the situation has improved for homeowners from the slums.
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There are now rules for compensation, but they vary widely from one region to the next.
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have no way of knowing to what extent they are actually complied with.
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The sums being paid are insanely high.
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They mostly buy living space, not just here, but elsewhere in other regions.
429
The number of conflicts over the demolition of urban villages has decreased.
430
But that doesn't mean circumstances have improved for the roughly 300 million low-income and migrant workers.
431
The raising of entire slum neighborhoods has left countless homeless.
432
The migrant workers who suffered, if you want to see it that way, under these poor conditions, are in another urban village, further out of the city.
433
They have to commute further for their job at the supermarket that these handful of rich who now live there shop in.
434
So it's a really kind of vicious cycle.
435
Yet China's real estate boom continues.
436
In 2017, a typical apartment in Shenzhen cost 41 times the average annual salary.
437
By comparison, in the German city of Munich, it cost 13 years' salary.
438
As a result, 22%, nearly a quarter of apartments in China, are empty.
439
Because nobody is willing or able to pay the rent, or because the owners hope the price will increase even further.
440
50 million vacant apartments, and there's no end in sight.
441
Now Beijing is set to merge with Huairo, Tianjin, and parts of Hebei.
442
So it will form a huge triangle, and the population is expected to grow to an estimated 60 to 70 million.
443
I don't know if that will happen, but if the past 10 to 11 years are any guide, it's entirely possible.
444
time." Shortly after, expectations had risen to 130 million.
445
By 2030, experts estimate that 80% of the population will live in cities.
446
But none of this would have been possible without low-wage workers.
447
And for them, one question is becoming ever more pressing.
448
At what cost?
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 448 sentences and 5107 words to shadow. The speech runs for 42:18. The speaker talks at a steady 121 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- collective /kəˈlɛktɪv/ (adjective) — Formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body.
- developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/ (noun) — A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
- migrant /ˈmaɪɡɹənt/ (noun) — A migratory animal, in particular a migratory bird.
- protest /ˈpɹoʊ.tɛst/ (noun) — A formal objection, especially one by a group.
- compensation /ˌkɑm.pənˈseɪ.ʃən/ (noun) — The act or principle of compensating.
- nail /neɪl/ (noun) — The horny plate or appendage at the ends of the digits of various animals, including most reptiles, birds, and mammals (both nonhuman and human).
- demolition /ˌdɛm.əˈlɪʃ.ən/ (noun) — The process of demolishing or destroying buildings or other structures.
- defend /dɪˈfɪnd/ (verb) — To ward off attacks against (something or someone).
- boom /bum/ (verb) — To make a loud, hollow, resonant sound.
- desperate /ˈdɛs.p(ə.)ɹɪt/ (adjective) — In dire need (of something); having a dire need or desire.
- explosive /ɛkˈspləʊsɪv/ (adjective) — Able to, or likely to, explode.
- surround /səˈɹaʊnd/ (verb) — To encircle something or simultaneously extend in all directions.
- belong /bɪˈlɒŋ/ (verb) — To have its proper place.
- corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/ (noun) — The act of corrupting or of impairing integrity, virtue, or moral principle; the state of being corrupted or debased; loss of purity or integrity.
- registration /ˌɹɛd͡ʒ.ɪˈstɹeɪ.ʃən/ (noun) — The act of signing up or registering for something.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- live in (verb) — To reside on the premises of one's employer (used especially of domestic staff such as nannies, cooks, maids, etc.)
- get in (verb) — To get into or inside something, literally or figuratively.
- hold out (verb) — To hold (something) out; to extend (something) forward.
- leave behind (verb) — To abandon.
- stay in (verb) — To remain at home.
- tear down /tɛə(ɹ)ˈdaʊn/ (verb) — To demolish.
- work in (verb) — To find time or space for, amid other things.
- back down (verb) — To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 62 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, can't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: eighth /eɪtθ/, thug /θʌɡ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: compensation /ˌkɑm.pənˈseɪ.ʃən/, demolition /ˌdɛm.əˈlɪʃ.ən/, corruption /kəˈɹʌpʃən/, registration /ˌɹɛd͡ʒ.ɪˈstɹeɪ.ʃən/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, compensation /ˌkɑm.pənˈseɪ.ʃən/, demolition /ˌdɛm.əˈlɪʃ.ən/, registration /ˌɹɛd͡ʒ.ɪˈstɹeɪ.ʃən/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like collective, developer, migrant.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has risen · has lived · has witnessed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are expropriated · are built · are surrounded |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | those who still · land, which is · land, which means |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.