An Untold Agenda Behind Selective Truth

By Liu Yunyun

When the news came that the village where I was born was going to be demolished and everyone would have to be relocated, I flew back home, nearly 1,000 miles away, to attend the grand “mobilization meeting” with my recorder and camera in case anything untoward happened.

Several people in charge of the demolition project explained in detail the steps that would be taken, promising that “the government won’t let you down.” I had mixed feelings about them because I’d read online stories before about holdouts in this situation being bullied.

During my two-day stay and my relentless endeavor to collect government “wrong-doings,” I heard entirely different stories: How siblings turned against each other over a few square meters of land; of how a husband and wife filed for divorce because while one found the government compensation acceptable, the other decided to hold out for more money; and how an old man in poor health wept because his house was completely blocked from sunlight—his sons built roofs over the open spaces to get more compensation from the government and developers.

After four months of seesaw negotiations, each family reached a settlement with the government and developers. The village where I grew up is now being rebuilt as part of Nanjing’s urbanization efforts. That is the reality. And that is partly the reason why the majority of the Chinese who have seen the recent BBC video and accompanying article BBC Team Forced to Sign Confession feel infuriated. The report recounted the team’s failure to meet a woman petitioning in a land dispute in central China’s Hunan Province because of intervention by “thugs.” The reporter used powerful and eye-catching words like “violence,” “intimidation” and “forced confession” to engage viewers and readers, while completely ignoring other perspectives in the dispute: the developers, government officials, and fellow villagers.

The BBC reporter’s deliberate carelessness is something to be examined.

The whole process of urbanization in China, which involves land reallocation and reintegration, is a Herculean task for local government officials. It requires wisdom and compromise to strike a delicate balance between social progress and personal justice in the form of compensation, while at the same time