A Woman Burns

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

CHENGDU, CHINA — Tang Huiqin got between China and its ferocious development push and still bears the scars. I found her, traumatized and trembling, in the northern outskirts of this vast city, where it’s common to see old houses with a single Chinese character scrawled in red on the facade: “Demolish.”

The thugs from the city demolition squad rolled into her neighborhood, a village called Jinhua now engulfed by urban sprawl, early on Nov. 13. A road was to be built and nothing — not women, nor children, nor years of painstaking homebuilding — was to stand in its way.

“They were beating me, beating me, and I could hear my younger sister, on the highest part of the roof, screaming ‘Older sister, older brother, have you been beaten to death?’” Tang, 53, told me. “I could hear her voice but I had blacked out from the beating and could not speak.”

We were seated in the courtyard of Tang’s simple home, adjacent to her sister’s house, now reduced to rubble. Chickens strutted about. Tang had just emerged from the hospital. A large reddish scar cut across her forehead. She was nervous. It can be dangerous in China to speak out, to speak truth to power. Tang stood up and raised her shirt to reveal severe bruising all down her left flank.

(More here.)