22 Replies to “Property Rights In China”

  1. You said yesterday that your entry would be ‘the only one’, but you couldnt wait to get back blogging; time-stamp on today’s entry: 12:01am.
    Do you ever sleep?

  2. asdf – the time stamp would be where the server is located – 10:01 in Sask.
    It’s really too bad this guy will lose, and I’ll bet that since he refused compensation, he will walk away with nothing.

  3. If that place was located in Toronto, I would rent it, (but they have to fill the moat with water, and then fill it with alligators.)

  4. You gotta hand it to the guy. That’s determination. I wonder if we ever got back our property rights in Canada if anyone here would go to those lengths.

  6. Some people are too stupid to take the money and run.
    Call Nickel Brothers house movers. That can be moved on low-beds at 4 am. = TG

  7. To help satisfy your curiosity – (as has been pointed out already) the server is in Florida and the blog has always been timestamped in that time zone. No special reason for that outside of laziness on my part.
    The other, lesser known fact is that MT allows me to create posts and schedule them to appear automatically at a later time. I often write 5 or 6 posts in a sitting, but prefer to stagger the times at which they appear so that new items aren’t pushed down the page too quickly.
    (Which is why you continued to see posts from me while I was in Arizona. They were written before I left.)

  8. Mr. Yang Wu reminds me of my favourite fictional character of all time, which if you refer to my Top 50 Documents Of All Time essay – tinyurl.com/ozn46 – you will find is one Mr. Bugs Bunny, who I note as follows:
    “Bugs Bunny is a fictional street-smart gray rabbit […] and is one of the most recognizable characters, real or imaginary, in the world. He is noted for his signature line of “Eh, what’s up, doc?” and his feuds with Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian, Daffy Duck, and even Wile E. Coyote, who usually takes on the Road Runner. Almost invariably, Bugs comes out the winner in these conflicts, because that is in his nature.
    “This is especially obvious in films directed by Chuck Jones, who liked to pit “winners” against “losers”. Worrying that audiences would lose sympathy for an aggressor who always won, Jones found the perfect way to make Bugs sympathetic in the films by having the antagonist repeatedly bully, cheat or threaten Bugs in some way. Thus offended, (usually three times) Bugs would often state “Of course, you realize this means war” (a line which Jones noted was taken from Groucho Marx) and the audience gives Bugs silent permission to inflict his havoc, having earned his right to retaliate and/or defend himself.”
    Bugs was in a number of episodes in which he defended the notion that “a man’s home is his castle”, as does Mr. Wu, perpaps most noticibly the cases where he he went up against the highway construction crew and got his den paved for free, or the case where he got a bank to build its skyscraper around his den, both of which remind me of this case.
    I couldn’t find those episodes at video.google.com (which now indexes YouTube), but this one is close, should you be so inclined:
    video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=6226296441966785384
    And then, of course, there’s always:
    video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-9163282018391440356
    video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-6845224696438746976
    and, don’t forget:
    video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-1468468656780122469
    video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7721718910773009169
    Ahh, I love philosophy! Have a great week, everyone.

  9. I suspect the “new” China does more to recognize this guy’s corporate rights ( as a business owner) than his individual property rights…none the less you have to feel a sick lump in your gut when you realize that the slack the Chi-coms are cutting him for property rights would definately not be forthcoming from any Canadian government…
    ….you know what would happen to this “holdout” if this development was in GTA, Calgary or Montreal…In these jurisdictions I’m afaid Mr. WU would have been offered near market value by developers and, if refused, the matter refered to the local planning authority which would make a final offer ( below market value as per distress sale) and deliver an ultimatim of Seizure in right of eminent domain.
    In a Recent US supremem court ruling eminent domain was ruled to take precedence over an individual’s property rights. So America has gone down the rabbit hole of state sponsored corporate feudalism as well.
    So we see a stark picture of 2 cultures…one ( western) was built on the premise that individual property rights was the cornerstone of civil freedom…the other ( China) after a long bitter experiment with communism realizes now that for a population to be productive/cooperative they must have a right to OWN personal property and have solid guarantees the state cannot steal it from them on a procedural whim.
    The contrast shows western states devolving individual property rights with the expansion of the omnipotent super state and the ex Chinese feudalist superstate enhancing property rights as a means to encourage the cooperation and productivity of its citizens.
    It has always been a personal tenet of mine that the health of a nation’s civil freedom is tied directly to its property rights laws…in Canada I have to say we are much less free than a Chinese citizen where property and the state’s ability to confiscate it are concerned.

  10. You beat me to it WL, if the guy was a business owner in Toronto that building would have been flattened and he’d be off to 52 Division for “creating a disturbance”.
    Because as we know, in Canada we don’t have the right to own property.

  11. This guy is a hero. (A foolish one but none the less).
    Its high time we had property rights entrenched in the Constitution.

  12. It is truly amazing how little respect our laws have for property owners. My father always told me that if you have nothing else in this world, you better have a strip of land because nobody can take that away from you. That was a lie.
    We, as citizens, need to stand up. Instead of fretting over what land or guns or “abused” children of ours might be taken away, it’s time to put the shoe on the other foot. Maybe appropriate some property that belongs to the people but has been kept under government domain – a port, a civil service building, a military base. The people can do a better job of running them than the government can.

  14. In 1970 I worked for the Ontario Dept of Highways and they did exactly this to an old lady that held out on selling her house for the re-alignment of highway 6.

  15. Now, if this holdout was in the GTA his ace in the hole (pun not intended) would be for him to claim to be an aboriginal who was swindled off his land.

  16. Glad to see I’m not the only one who was immediately reminded by this photo of Bugs’s battles with the forces of “progress”!

  17. I can just imagine the back-alley beatings this guy would get if he did this in canuckistan.

  18. Texas Canuk,
    You prompted the ideal idea for *Property claim insurance*.
    If you can bury some found arrowheads and other native objects 10 inches down next to your driveway, you could be *covered*.
    Avoid the temptation to bury old human bones. That would certainly backfire. = TG

  19. A man’s home is his castle.
    The moat btw is outstanding!
    Should make a great diving tank once the water gets added. Add a few exotic fishes and the guy could charge admission to help subsidize his fight with the authorities.

  20. Communists and envromentalists extremists reject private property rights it was said by ec–extremist PETER BERYLE who once rain the AUDUBON SOCIETY and now belong to the infamous SIERRA CLUB

  22. I find it ironic that in communist China this guy has a greater right to his home than in arch-capitalist USA where the “men in black” would have shown up with MP5’s and shotguns to enforce the state’s business of evicting homeowners for the benefit of the government’s developer friends.

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