A huge protest in China
Over parking fees
But no one is supposed to know
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Chris Chappell.
You might not think of China as a place where people do much protesting. But every year,
there are hundreds of thousands of what are called “mass incidents.”
These are basically protests involving hundreds or even thousands of people.
We just don’t hear a lot about them. They get scrubbed pretty quickly from the Chinese internet.
Here’s one example. On July 14th, a massive protest of thousands of homeowners broke out
in Chongqing, a city in Western China. When the police got involved, things got heated.
“They’re fighting. Oh, they’re fighting. Woah, there’s gunshots!”
It’s not clear whether those were actual gunshots. It’s more likely tear gas or something
similar. The protest was so large, hundreds of security guards and riot police showed up.
People were dragged out of the crowds and arrested.
Some protesters were injured after being pushed to the ground by security.
Here, police officers are forming a human chain
against protestors as these buses take away people they’ve arrested.
So what caused this “mass incident?” The protesters are residents of an
apartment complex in Chongqing. They were protesting the property
developer, Evergrande Group . It’s China’s second-largest property developer by sales.
And this protest was about parking fees.
Yes, a lot of people feel very strongly about parking fees.
You see, the apartment owners used to be able to park for free.
Then Evergrande started to charge very high parking fees.
If you didn’t want to pay a parking fee, you could buy a parking spot. But instead of selling parking
spots to residents directly, Evergrande sold them to another property development company.
That company then doubled the price before selling the spaces to the homeowners.
So residents felt like they were being price gouged by the property developers.
At first, videos of the protest spread across Chinese social media. Until “The incident was
blocked by local authorities, and the videos on social media Weibo and Douyin were deleted.”
This isn’t an isolated problem. Property developers in China are pretty cozy with
local authorities, who make lots of money through taxes and kickbacks from real estate transactions.
So local authorities are pretty willing to side with the property developers.
This isn’t even the first mass protest over parking fees.
A similar incident happened in 2014
with a large housing estate in Nanning, a city in Guangxi Province.
In that case, hundreds of riot police showed up with tear gas and pepper spray
to stop owners from protesting. More than 40 people were arrested.
Why are real estate protests common in China? I’ll tell you why after the break.
Welcome back.
China’s real estate market has been called one of its “grey rhinos''. This term was used in a book
written by Michele Wucker called “The Gray Rhino” . It means an obvious threat that we still ignore.
Just like a two-ton thing with horns
charging straight at you. But for some reason, you’re not running away.
Gray rhinos are not random surprises, but occur after a series of warnings and visible evidence.
And there have been plenty of warnings about China’s real estate market.
Chinese people don’t have a lot of places to put their money. So they invest heavily
in real estate. Real estate accounts for 70 percent of urban residents’ assets.
There have been protests when real estate prices rise.
There have been protests when real estate prices fall.
And the real estate market can fluctuate a lot.
“Some property developers have slashed prices on new apartments to gin up business or cut
corners to save money. That undercuts the property values of earlier buyers,
who increasingly are taking to the streets to protest.”
So maybe China’s real estate market isn’t a gray rhino. It’s a herd of gray rhinos.
And if China’s real estate market is a herd of rhinos, then Evergrande,
the property developer behind the parking fee protest, is one of the biggest rhinos in the herd.
The founder of Evergrande, Hui Ka Yan , was ranked among the richest people in China this year.
Hui was even invited to watch the Chinese Communist Party’s
100th Anniversary Celebration on July 1st in Tiananmen Square.
That shows he’s got close ties to the Chinese Communist Party leadership.
But as it turns out, Evergrande has tremendous
debt problems. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of debt problems.
And so Evergrande has been drastically squeezing profits,
by selling property and selling assets. And now, Evergrande’s
shares are plummeting down to a four-year low as it was ordered to freeze its assets.
So the parking fee protests seem to just be part of a bigger problem for Evergrande.
But the good news for Evergrande is that these parking fee protests
were censored so quickly, not a lot of people saw them.
But there were little cracks of cryptic discussion that bled through Chinese social media platform
Weibo. It’s an instructive look at how people try to get around censored topics in China.
One user started the discussion with a post about “Gunshots heard at Evergrande Chongqing Shuangfu.”
Here are some of the replies to this post:
“Did you see lots of people on the street?” “There’s a lot.”
“Discussions aren’t allowed, it’ll be quickly deleted”
“There’s absolutely no new reports about this.”
“How do you expect journalists to be able to report this?”
“Evergrande’s background is shady, no matter how big the issue,
media outlets don’t report anything about them.”
“Free parking spaces were sold, causing uproar.”
“Yes, there’s videos outside the firewall. Lots of people.”
So some Chinese netizens were jumping China’s Great Firewall with VPNs to get
around the censorship. Other netizens talk in code. Like this Weibo user,
who used another news story to cryptically point people toward the censored protest story:
“#Evergrande Group Ordered to Freeze Assets. Seeing this headline news makes me think of
something, July 14th, in Chongqing, Those with [VPN] can go search it. Sometimes when we don’t
see bad news, it’s not because it doesn’t exist, but because it’s been screened.”
And while there are still some of these coded discussions about the protests,
videos about the protests no longer exist on the Chinese internet at all.
And news articles have been censored, too. Links that went to articles about the protest
now just lead to this error message saying the article has ‘snuck away.’
Oops! Information can be such a rascal.
It just sneaks away all the time. I guess that’s one way to solve a gray rhino. Keep ignoring it!
And now it’s time for me to answer a question from a member of the China Uncensored 50-cent army.
A fan who supports the show on the crowdfunding website Patreon. To learn more about how you can
join and support our work exposing the Chinese regime, visit patreon.com/ChinaUncensored.
Deagle asks: What if Jackie is secretly still on our
side. He knows everything he supports fails and thus the reason why he is now supporting the ccp.
Interesting idea, Deagle. This was in response to our episode about how
Jackie Chan wants to join the Chinese Communist Party.
We talked about how in the past, Chan has supported a bunch of companies that failed.
So since everything he supports fails, could Jackie Chan’s support
be the key to bringing down the Chinese Communist Party?
Wait a minute. What if Jackie Chan has been in the CIA all along?
Just like in his hit movie The Spy Next Door.
And he’s been buttering up the CCP for years so he can take them down from the inside!
Nah! That’s too crazy. It’s almost as crazy as the idea
the CIA is funding YouTube channels to bring down the CCP.
Thanks for your question and your support, Deagle.
And a big thank you to everyone who supports China Uncensored on Patreon.
Because the CIA does not. So we could not do this show without you.
If you’re interested in joining, head over to Patreon.com/ChinaUncensored. You’ll get
a bunch of cool perks, including the chance to have me answer your question on the show!
Once again I’m Chris Chappell, see you next time.