How a small village stood up to China's authoritarian state.
Peter Foster in Qinglongshan
It is a story that could be told a thousand times a day in modern China: humble peasants driven from their homes and swept off their land with scant compensation in the name of China's headlong rush for economic development.
But for the inhabitants of "Blue Dragon Mountain" village in China's far northeast of Heilongjiang, the everyday narrative of dispossession has a different ending, after a group of men dared to stand up to the Goliath that is China's authoritarian state.
In December, 1998, bulldozers demolished their homes to make way for a reservoir to supply drinking water to the rapidly expanding tourist centre of Harbin, but when the local government failed to give adequate compensation, the villagers decided to move back in.
"We returned to the village on April 10 [1999] and at first it was very hard," recalled Yu Liyou, one of the original returnees, speaking under the watchful gaze of Chairman Mao Tse-tung whose beatifically smiling portraits are still found in rural homes in China.
"We all lived together in a simple collective house and divided into four work brigades to rebuild the village. It was just like the production teams in the old days."
And so began a decade-long stand-off against the local authorities that continues to this day and has become a national example of how the nameless, numberless casualties of China's economic progress can sometimes stand up for themselves.
Officially the village of Blue Dragon Mountain - Qinglongshan in Chinese - ceased to exist in 1998: its name was erased from maps, the electricity was disconnected, the dirt road closed and its inhabitants relocated to neighbouring districts where - officially - they still live.
But as The Daily Telegraph came bouncing and rolling into the village along a makeshift dirt road last week, it was clear that the non-existent village did very much exist; indeed it even appeared to be expanding, with one farmer hammering away at the rafters of a half-completed new house.
By Chinese standards, the villagers are far from poor, their fields bursting with maize and soy, their courtyard gardens packed with early autumn produce: fleshy red tomatoes, sunflowers drooping with seed, aubergines, runner beans and bunches of scarl et chillies hung up to dry.
Around the 100-year-old well, where villagers still come every day to haul up buckets of drinking water, talk soon turned to the Qinglongshan's future and the latest round of negotiations that failed to break the decade-long deadlock.
"I talked to those government people, and they said, 'There's nothing here, look on the map, you don't exist'," said a 76-year-old village elder, Xiao Yongting. "So I replied, 'Well, if we don't exist, what are we? An independent nation state?'"
This story of bravado in the face of officialdom, delivered by the old man as he cracked sunflower seeds expertly between his two remaining teeth, raises a round of appreciative snorts from the fellow villagers.
But the seditious cackles disguise the limits of the villagers' victory: for all their defiance, the government officials are factually correct; in the eyes of the all-powerful Chinese bureaucracy the inhabitants of Blue Dragon Mountain don't exist as they have no ID cards and no resident's papers.
Without these documents they must live in limbo, unable even to buy a train ticket, or check into a hotel (ID card required), which makes long-distance travel all but impossible; they also cannot open a bank account, apply for rural medical insurance, take a job with a registered company or enrol in a university.
Every villager has a hard-luck story to tell. "My daughter graduated from technical college but every time she applied for a job at a factory she was rejected," said Yu Liyou, "Then she won a job on the railways until they saw she has no registration and no ID card. Now she just does casual work, it's all she can do."
"We don't want anything except our basic rights and recognition that we are citizens of the People's Republic of China," added another householder, gesturing at the concrete electricity poles that still run through the village, but bare and useless without their wires.
The disenfranchisement of the inhabitants of Blue Dragon Mountain is an extreme case, but their situation is familiar to tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers who go to China's cities to find jobs and end up living unregistered in factory dorms and building site boarding houses.
Despite being the engine of China's economy, their lack of official status effectively makes these workers illegal immigrants in their own land, unable to educate their children, buy property or get medical care in the cities they are helping to build.
Like the doughty, obstinate residents of Blue Dragon Mountain, they are powerless but angry, as the rising annual tally of riots and social unrest in China demonstrates.
Pressure to change the resident's registration system is building, but the Chinese authorities are also reluctant to give up on a system that allows them a key measure of control over China's development.
For those driven by economic necessity to live outside the system, like the residents of Blue Dragon Mountain and millions of migrant workers across China, the consequences are life-defining.
"Without a resident's paper, I can't even get a birth certificate for my baby," says Zhang Yin, a 24-year-old villager, who is heavily pregnant with a child soon to born into the limbo of Qinglongshan.
"He will not exist as a proper citizen of China, he will find it hard to get into a proper school, or get a good job.
"All we ask is that the government give us proper recognition, and not make our children pay for the sins of their fathers."
The Daily Telegraph
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