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chesswarsnow
12-27-2007, 11:30 PM
Sorry bout that,

1. I wonder what your opinions are on this?
2. Its been said by many people of China, that the Chinese Government is stealing lands.
3. Are we seeing the same things in America?
4. Have you seen this happen?
5. Can you claim America is innocent of this?
6. I know of a certain story, that proves that here in the DFW area, the City of Fort Worth, is doing this.
7. It was an old Theatre, showed movies, on the west side of Fort Worth, called, *7th Street Theatre*.
8. It was a private Theatre, built by a single family, the old guys dream was to have his own Theatre, which he built and worked it for over fifty years.
9. Well he up and died, shoot he got old, and passed on.
10. The Theatre set for six months, then, BAM!, bulldozers showed up and tore down the whole back of the Theatre.
11. City of Fort Worth, said *Opps!*
12. It was a City wreaking crew.
13. Well they had to buy it now, seeing they broke it.
14. Now guess what, a 13 story highrise condo is springing up with commerical on the first couple floors.
15. I think this kind of greed isn't confined to China, its right here under our noses.
16. Read China's side thusly:
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/international-news/portfolio/2007/12/17/Property-Rights-in-China/?TID=advert/drudge/Urban_China

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China's Next Revolution
by Joshua Kurlantzick January 2008 Issue
With the Beijing Olympics only months away, a massive wave of protests is sweeping the country over government landgrabs—and unlike past movements, many of the demonstrators are urban professionals. Will the battles over property spur demands for broader rights?


As real estate values soar, everyone from wealthy developers to government officials is grabbing property. See All Video & Multimedia
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Latest: Dec 27 2007 1:48pm ET
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VIEW SLIDESHOW
FINAL HOURS A Shanghai home on the eve of its destruction.
Photograph by: Greg Girard
On a baking hot Beijing summer day, the air thick with haze, a curious crowd jostles around a narrow two-story building in a prosperous neighborhood close to Tiananmen Square. It stands alone, surrounded by rubble. Thick padlocks hang on the front door. Signs and banners plastered over its shuttered front windows proclaim in Chinese "This Is Illegal!"

The building contains a restaurant on the first floor and a family home on the second. When I walk to the door and ask about the signs, Sun Ruonan, a woman with a flat face and meaty arms, wades out from the center of the crowd, opens the padlocks, ushers me inside, then locks the door again. “There are police all around watching us,” she says under her breath.

Sun’s family ran the now-closed restaurant and has lived or worked in this building for more than a century. But earlier in 2007, local officials posted a notice evicting Sun and her sister and announcing that the building would be torn down. They said that Beijing was turning the land into green space for the 2008 Olympics and that the marathon might be routed through it. The government offered the family members compensation, but they refused to leave, claiming the money promised was far less than the market value of the property. “We have the property rights of the house. We know it,” Sun says. “I don’t want money. I want justice.”

Sun had heard about other people fighting evictions, so she and her sister, Sun Ruoyu, began reading up on the law and sending letters to local officials. No one responded. Then the two women took a more direct approach: They plastered their home with banners and signs, hoping to draw crowds and possibly local media. One day, when a bulldozer arrived to start demolishing their house, Sun’s sister climbed onto the machine, forcing it to stop. So far, their strategy has worked: Their battle has been chronicled by the international press, and the building still stands. Sun isn’t taking any chances though. “The tables and cupboards have been stripped bare, so there’s nothing valuable here,” she says. “We’re afraid that all these things will be destroyed.”

Similar protests are sweeping across China. As real estate values soar and land becomes a red-hot commodity, everyone from wealthy developers to government officials is grabbing property. But a rising number of middle-class homeowners, like the Sun sisters, are fighting back. In Shanghai and Beijing, demonstrators protesting evictions have paraded through streets and blocked roads. Earlier in the summer, about 20,000 protesters rioted in the town of Shengzhou after security forces tried to compel families to leave their land, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a Chinese human rights group. (The families had been offered some compensation, but they claimed it was too little.) One 90-year-old woman who refused to move reportedly climbed atop her building and waved gasoline bombs at the authorities. Two years ago, in the southern village of Dongzhou, locals who were furious about the lack of compensation for land taken from them attacked police, brandishing bombs and knives. Firing back, police shot and killed 20 people, by some estimates, though the official government report acknowledges three deaths. The Dongzhou case and others dominated the Chinese blogosphere for months.

(EDIT: Please don't post entire stories. More at link.)

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17. Here's the 7th Street Theatre:http://www.fortwortharchitecture.com/oldftw/neighborhoodmovies.jpg

Regards,
SirJamesofTexas

5stringJeff
12-28-2007, 08:06 AM
I don't know about China, which is a Communist country where the people have no rights. But in the US, the Constitution is supposed to protect us from such seizures. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS decision Kelo stripped some of our property rights away, saying that the government could take your land and give it to someone else if the overall social benefit was greater. Many states have passed laws to the contrary since then.