China already has built a reputation for dispossessing its farming rural population and forcing them into cities. Over the last two decades of the previous century, China urbanized some 40 million people in this way.[1]

This form of urban social engineering actually has caused the loss of assets, livelihoods, cultural endowment and the reported decline in living conditions for those affected. The contradictions of this widely touted policy are becoming ever clearer as China’s government pushes forward with the most ambitious population transfer project ever, targeting 250 million people and taking their productive land.

In an important series published in The New York Times, correspondent Ian Johnson has reported from the perspective of those affected. The articles note how the subject households variously subsidize this policy, too often paying with their livelihoods and very lives. This story of dysfunction, dissatisfaction and despair recounts how this emblematic worst of urbanization models deviates from the realization of human rights to adequate housing and decent work, and poses a cynical antithesis to the “right to the city.”

Find the links to Ian Johnson’s article series and accompanying videos and slide shows below:

“Picking Death over Eviction,” The New York Times, 8 September 2013;

“New China Cities: Shoddy Homes, Broken Hope,” The New York Times, 9 November 2013;

China`s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million into Cities, The New York Times, 15 June 2014;

Pitfalls Abound in China`s Push from Farm to City The New York Times, 13 July 2014.

Photo: Li Rui, 60, scavenged his former village for building materials in Liaocheng. Mr. Li was a farmer until three years ago, when the local government razed his village for an urban development zone. Source: Justin Jin for The New York Times.

[1] HIC-HLRN and COHRE, “Joint Parallel Report on Government of China’s Implementation of the Human Right to Adequate Housing (Article 11 of the Covenant)” [submitted to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights], 30 April 2005, at: http://www.hlrn.org/img/documents/China%20joint%20parallel%20report%20final.pdf, citing Congressional Executive Commission on China, “Forced Evictions and Land Requisitions,” Annual Report 2004, at: http://www.cecc.gov/pages/virtualAcad/rol/property2004.php.