Beatings, evictions, demolition: The ugly side of China’s local debt pile

When Xu Haifeng’s home was razed three years ago, she went to China’s capital Beijing to complain about the city and county governments that ordered the demolition.

Since then, she says family members have been kidnapped at least 18 times, typically having black bags thrust over their heads before being taken to a hotel-turned-illegal jail in the eastern city of Wuxi and locked for weeks in a tiny, windowless room.

Xu’s story is shocking even in a country that has become used to tales of arbitrary and sometimes violent land expropriations. It illustrates how the stresses from the deep indebtedness of China’s local governments extend beyond banks into the lives of ordinary Chinese, as hard-up authorities resort to any means they can in a desperate scramble for funds.

“Our Wuxi is now steep in debt,” said Xu. “The Wuxi city today relies on drawing from residents’ financial wealth and stealing residents’ land to survive.”

Her 74-year-old mother, she says, has been abducted nearly a dozen times and held illegally for almost a year in a campaign to silence the family’s demands for proper compensation.

Land seizures rank as among the biggest causes of social tension in China, spotlighting an ugly side of the urbanisation drive that has raised it to the world’s second-biggest economy.

Amnesty International said in a report last year that land grabs have increased as the economy slows and local governments have sought cash to pay off debt, though other experts dispute the finding. There is no official data on land grabs.