It Fell From the Sky. Now China Wants It.
BEIJING — One day, a Kazakh herder in northwest China noticed a giant black boulder had appeared overnight in the grasslands where he raises sheep and cattle. He left it there, and it sat undisturbed for more than two decades.
But in 2011, local officials declared the rock a meteorite and hauled it away, arguing that natural resources were state property. So the herder and his sons decided to sue.
“The meteorite wasn’t made on land, or even on the earth,” the family’s lawyer, Sun Yi, said. “It’s from outer space, so it should belong to the person who first discovered it.”
The case opened in the Xinjiang autonomous region last month after years of legal wrangling. A verdict is expected within six months. Legal experts say it highlights how the private land-use rights that China’s governing Communist Party — in a country where all land is owned by the state — are so broadly defined that they often sow confusion.
But the case exposes what is a legal black hole: Chinese statutes do not clearly indicate who owns property with intergalactic characteristics.
“We’re left with a blank, a vacuum, in Chinese law, with no definition of natural resources and no clear saying as to whether meteorite rights belong to the state,” said Zhang Libin, a lawyer in Beijing who advises the government.
The meteorite weighs 16 metric tons and is made of siderite, or iron carbonate, according to the Chinese news media.
Mr. Sun said he thought it was worth nearly $320 million based on his understanding of the commercial meteorite market. But Tong Xianping, a meteorite collector, said $24 million was a more realistic value.
And Eric Twelker, the founder of the Meteorite Market, an online emporium in the United States, said he doubted that the meteorite was worth millions of dollars because he rarely saw specimens of any size selling for much more than about $30,000.
In 1986, the herder in the Xinjiang case, Juman Reamazhaen, was told by local officials that he could keep the meteorite, according to his son, Teliewubieke Juman. But in 2011, government workers went to the family’s property in Kuoleteke village to seize it.
Mr. Reamazhaen and his two sons insisted the meteorite was theirs, and they took turns protecting it in roundthe-clock shifts, Mr. Juman said. But when they ended their vigil because of cold weather, the workers swooped in. The meteorite sits in a wooden crate outside a government office.
Experts say the herders’ case will depend on whether a clause in Chinese law that defines natural resources as state property — in which the word “et cetera” appears at the end of a list of natural resources that includes mountains, grasslands and wetlands — should apply to things from outer space.
“Both sides seem to have an argument which is seemingly right, but there is no clear answer,” Mr. Zhang said. “The state says if the law says ‘et cetera,’ then you can certainly include meteorites. But then it goes to the question of how to define natural resources.”