gor[b] Paul Gorbould: Words and Pictures

gor[b]: Now available in China

I read a great story today, accompanied by a greater picture, about a real estate dispute going on in Chongqing, China. The house in this picture is referred to as the "nail house", because it's so hard to remove.

It seems that while 280 neighbours sold their land to this real estate developer, one family is holding out - for a rumoured $2.5 million (a different article claims the owner is demanding an apartment of equivalent size in the new building.) They've been without water or power for two years. If you check out the first link, be sure to read the comments - there's not as much sympathy for the owners as one might expect.

The blog Peering Into The Interior has transcribed an interview with Ms. Wu Ping, who owns the holdout property, including some spectacular photos. And check out this link for a picture of what happens when a "nail house" holds out forever.

What's interesting about this story is that it's both universal - fights between developers and property owners happen everywhere - and peculiar to China, where for the first time since 1949, legislators are debating protecting personal property rights. (All land in China is the property of the state.) The issue is so sensitive that the influential independent biweekly Chinese business magazine Caijing was mysteriously pulled from the shelves.

Ah yes, that's Chinese media, old school.

China may be making strides to open up, but it's got a long way to go - particularly on the internet. Of the seven links I posted above, four have been censored and are unavailable in China.

In his very amusing post Me vs. the World, Sinister Dan points to a site called the Great Firewall of China, which lets you plug in a URL to see if it's reachable inside China.

He even extended the courtesy of checking my blog, and found that it has not been censored:

In typical fashion, STD explains my blog access as follows:

Since Paul works for the CBC, this was actually fairly predictable. One centralized tool of cultural oppression could hardly pick on the employee of another.

His blog, on the other hand, is blocked. His best guess is that he made an earlier post containing the phrase "Mao was a Stupid, Fat Hobbit".

Now, I may be a tool of cultural oppression (hell, that might get put into my Technorati blog description!) but I did once mock up a photo of Mao on a jar of mayonnaise. But I guess that's OK in the new China.

Getting blocked seems to be a bit of a badge of honour - I'll have to come up with something more offensive, so I can get the big red boot. Or perhaps I can try to see how long I can hold out, like good old Ms. Wu, and become a "nail blog".

Not that it matters - I don't seem to get much traffic from China. In the past 24 hours I've had visitors from Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Utrecht, Almaty, Victoria, Limburg, Poznan, Istanbul and Nantes, but nothing from the People's Republic. I long for the opportunity to disappoint that fifth of the world as well.