Qin Hui, "Looking at China from South Africa" 4

Qin Hui, “Looking at China from South Africa:  How South Africa and China ‘Got Rid of Ghettos:’  The Sophiatown Incident and Shenzhen’s Great “Clean-Up’”[1]　
 
Translation by David Ownby
 
As early as the nineteenth century, Proudhon’s theory that slums were the “sin of capitalism” was rejected by Engels, who pointed out that the poor “generally live in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings.”  This “is not something peculiar to the present [i.e., capitalism]; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it.”[2]  Clearly, Engels believed that “slums” were not unique to “capitalism.”
 
If that is the case, then what would be the housing problem that is truly unique to “modernity,” or to capitalism?  The fact that “slums” are destroyed to fulfill the needs of the social elite, so that even the “already terrible living conditions” of the urban poor are also taken away from them!  This is how Engels put it:  “The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and often colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value, instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with workers’ houses which are situated centrally and whose rents, even with the greatest overcrowding, can never, or only very slowly, increase above a certain maximum. They are pulled down and in their stead shops, warehouses and public buildings are erected… But the spirit of Haussmann has also been abroad in London, Manchester and Liverpool, and seems to feel itself just as much at home in Berlin and Vienna. The result is that the workers are forced out of the centre of the towns towards the outskirts; that workers’ dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable, for under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive houses, , builds workers’ dwellings only by way of exception.”[3]
 
Engels used the contemporary example of Baron Haussmann’s “great destruction” of the slums to build the “beautiful Paris,” and plaintively noted that:  “Through its Haussmann in Paris, Bonapartism exploited this tendency tremendously for swindling and private enrichment.”[4]  Engels insisted that this phenomenon was not confined to Paris, and instead was commonly practiced in all “modern” countries. 

This conclusion is slightly mistaken:  in fact, in market economies under democratic politics, the classical “Haussmann phenomenon” rarely occurs.  And this is why, in many such countries, poor areas have continued to exist in the central cities (this is what white South Africans ridiculed as “disorganized urbanization”).  The Haussmann phenomenon in France was instead the result of the destruction, by Bonapartism’s Second Republic, of the norms of republican democracy.  In fact, it was exceptional even for France.  After the collapse of the Second Republic, France continued to carry out urban reform through agreed upon demolition, but never again used the iron fist of “great destruction” against the poor.
 
Clearly, this kind of “slum removal” is not a general rule of capitalism, but rather a general rule of “primitive accumulation” under the politics of dictatorship.  China and pre-democratic South Africa are the classic examples of countries who can carry out such practices in the present day.
 
As already discussed, the struggle for residence rights among the “mobile population” is an irresistible wave in both South Africa and China.  But in circumstances where there is no public housing and where private housing is not affordable, housing for the poor, whether they build it themselves or if they rent, will not be “elegant.”  The shanties they build themselves and the cheap rentals they inhabit are both generally seen as “slums.”  In recent years, some commentators in China have recognized the inhumanity of slum removal in a situation where the state does not guarantee housing, and argue as well that “slum” is an unpleasant word; they have proposed that they be called “popular areas 平民区,” “harmonious areas 和谐社区,” or even “areas awaiting prosperity 待富区.” 

It is true that “slum” is an unpleasant word, but it has no sense of “violating property rights.”  I have already pointed out that the original meaning of slum was “small alleys facing away from the streets,” and later on when the meaning evolved to that of slums, it usually meant legal residences of poor families.  The United Nations Human Settlements Program defines slums as family housing of great density, without running water, and without toilets.  According to this standard, in 2000, as much as 39% of China’s urban population [i.e., those with residence permits for cities and townships] was living in “slums.” 

​Because the percentage of the mobile population with “family residence permits” is lower (dormitories have historically not been seen as slums), the percentage of migrant workers living is slums is lower than that of the urban population as a whole.  In most countries, the very idea of slums leads people to sympathize with the poor and to demand that the government do its utmost to lend assistance.  To say that slums are “detrimental to the state’s (really, the officials’)” reputation makes some sense, but to say that slums are detrimental to the poor makes none.  Surely “routing the enemy 犁庭扫穴” by destroying the homes and chasing out the people out of the ghettos will not help the poor!
 
Conditions are the opposite in South Africa and China, where both states deny the existence of “slums.”  But there are terms like “illegal occupant 违法擅占” (South Africa) or “illegal building 违章建筑” (China), which recalls Yao Yang’s having chastised the poor for “violating property rights.”  But the word “slum,” as already mentioned, means neither “illegal occupant” nor “illegal construction.”  English usually uses another word, “squatter,” to refer to those who “illegally occupy land or build without permission.”  Yao Yang, like the authorities in China and South Africa, clearly demeans the poor he wants to kick out by calling them squatters, which gives permission to use the iron fist of the “city management officers 城管” to deal with them.
 
As I’ve already argued above, while the idea of a “squatter” makes some sense in democratic countries that are somewhat “lenient” toward poor people who build their own homes, in countries like China and South Africa, phenomena linked to the problems of “Latin Americanization,” like the “poor people’s enclosure movement 穷人的圈地运动,” or “developers must make way for the poor 开发商为穷人让路” simply cannot exist.  In fact, the poor urban areas of either of the two countries could well be called “slums” (the residences of individual households 个别户 are another matter), but there is no way that there are squatters.
 
In South Africa, the blacks who live in Soweto have of course been acknowledged by the authorities, as one of the few black communities within “white cities” to have been “cleaned up.”  Sophiatown, the township in Johannesburg, as well as the Number Six area in Capetown, were also built by white developers.  Sophiatown, located four kilometers from the center of Johannesburg, was originally built by a real estate company that erected a number of low-standard homes there for “poor whites.”  The municipal authorities subsequently decided they were “sub-standard,” and inappropriate for whites, so they refused to provide municipal services.  For this reason, the poor whites were lodged elsewhere.  Trying to avoid a loss, the real estate company sold (or rented) the houses to black temporary workers, and the area wound up being a black slum with a population of 50,000.  This was clearly the result of a genuine transaction, and had nothing to do with “squatting.”
 
But China doesn’t even have a Soweto, and it’s all the more impossible that “migrant workers” “illegally occupy” an area.  If they don’t live in a dormitory and seek out their own homes, then they usually rent, whether in Beijing’s “Zhejiang (or Anhui) Village,” or Shenzhen’s “relocation area,” or the “city villages” found all over China, they all rent.  There are in fact shantytowns in China’s big cities, and in architectural terms they are clearly “slums.”  But usually these huts are built by people with urban residence permits, and the workers only rent them.  Sometimes the urban residence holders go ahead and rent the land to the outsiders, and let them build while they take the money, but they are still renting and not “illegally occupying.”  Sometimes the unexpected happens in India or Latin America, when poor people occupy “empty land” and later on are recognized as “owners,” but could such a thing ever occur to a “disadvantaged group” in South Africa or China?
 
But if a powerful person says that you are “illegally occupying” something then you are.  So in China and in the past version of South Africa, we can find plenty of cases of “property violations,” but it was never the case that “slums violated property rights,” but precisely the opposite—the violation was of the property rights of the poor slum-dwellers.  Let’s look at two examples. 
 
In the case of Sophiatown, mentioned above, blacks had lived there peacefully and without incident for years, when in 1950, the South African authorities decided they wanted to develop the property, and announced that they were going to “clean up the slums.”  Due to the opposition of the African Congress, the demolition plan was delayed until 1953, when the black people were to be newly “relocated” to a location 13 miles from the city.  Because of black resistance, opposition to the demolition was strong, and things dragged on for two more years. 

On February 9, 1955, the government finally sent in several thousand police to carry out the demolition, and the African Congress mobilized the resistance around the slogan “over my dead body,” but after a few more weeks of struggle, the government won.    At the time, this incident aroused international public opinion, and everyone rushed to condemn the violence.  There also appeared literary works based on the subject, such as the well-known progressive South African film “Drum,” based on these events. 

The justification South African authorities gave for their actions was that Sophiatown was a problematic slum.  But in the eyes of public opinion, this did not justify the government’s behavior.  As the American writer Huddleston[5] put it:  “Sophiatown in the past was definitely a slum, something that no one who lived there would deny.  But slum reform does not mean confiscating the entire property of an area.”  And following the authorities’ self-satisfied declaration of “victory,”  the New York Times published an editorial that pointed out that the official reports “read like those of a police state, and leave the reader greatly disturbed.”  On the ruins of Sophiatown was built a new white city, named Triomp (Victory), which, in the angry words of Bishop Desmund Tutu, “rubbed salt in our wounds.”
 
In addition to the Sofiatown incident, there were several other instances of “slum removal,” such as in 1960, when the Botha government used strong-arm tactics to destroy the District Six area in Capetown where black temporary workers lived.  This type of behavior left behind long-lasting historical scars.  There is a mural on the former site of Sophiatown called “Expulsion,” and District Six in Capetown has a memorial whose inscription reads:  “To all respected visitors:  Please remember the thousands of people who lived in District Six over the generations, and who were chased from their homes solely because of [the color of] their skin; please remember St. Mark’s church and this community, who resisted the destruction of District Six!”
 
China’s slum removal is all the more cold-blooded, and its scope incomparably larger than in South Africa.  Beijing’s clean-up of “Zhejiang village” and “Henan village” in the 1990s, the more recent clean-up of the “Petitioners’ Village,” as well as many cities’ recent removal of “city villages” where many migrant workers rent, are all examples of complete annihilation.  The Shenzhen region, to take but one example, has in recent years carried out several “unprecedented clean-ups of illegal building behavior,” such as one instance in 2004, called “farewell to a million shanties,” which “according to official news was the equivalent of evicting a mid-sized city of one million.” 

At its most impressive, the “removal proceeded at the frightening pace of more than 50,000 square meters per day.  Throughout the area of the clean-up, the temporary shacks were razed to the ground, and the migrants who had lived there fled in all directions.”  The city leadership announced:  “We are using not only a comb, but a fine-toothed comb, to bring order to every corner of this city.”  The clean-up affected areas “inside the pass” and outside, and they set fire to the remains of the removal for good measure, a practice they called “administrative burning!”  In addition to destroying the shanties, the heartless “municipal management officers” took the carts and scales the migrants used to make a living, and destroyed the “private schools” attended by their children.
 
Despite all of this, there remained “slums” that slipped through the cracks.  In 2007, I saw a number of dilapidated shacks in Shenzhen hidden among the longan trees on the slope of a hill outside a walled community of handsome rental houses.  One of the occupants told me that he was from Lianjiang 廉江 County in Guangxi, and had been working in Shenzhen for twenty years.  His family had moved back and forth and finally wound up here, a place not only without water and electricity, but which lacked even an address, so that when people back home wanted to get in touch, they called his relatives in the city, and they contacted him.  When I tried to take a photograph of his shack he looked a little frightened.  I said that if his situation were known, he might get some help.  He said that if the situation were known, they might have to move again and they had nowhere else to go…
 
The local government justified their actions as follows.  First, they argued that “city villages” are slums, and in the case of slum removal, compensation should be provided, but shanties in the suburbs are occupied by squatters, and the buildings are to be destroyed without compensation.  In fact, neither claim makes much sense.  First, in international terms, “illegal occupation” generally refers to the absence of a permit, and referring to anything that falls outside of municipal regulations as “illegal occupation” is too broad.  In fact, most outside workers who rent or build shanties have the approval of base-level government, have signed a contract and pay rent.  If something is against the law, then local governments are against the law, so why are they not punished instead of the renters? 

As one scholar pointed out:  the “illegal behavior” of the shanty dwellers has been ongoing sometimes for as much as twenty years.  If the shacks were not razed in the past (because someone wanted the labor of the shanty-dweller), then this was a failure to act on the part of the administration.  Is it reasonable that the consequences of this failure be borne by the renter?  Moreover, while the rentals in the “urban villages” do not conform to city regulations, and while the quality of the housing differs from the suburban shanties and the rent is different, the process of renting is similar in both cases, so why is one a slum and the other a squatter?  In fact, the compensation granted in the case of the “reform of urban villages” goes to the owner of the property, and the migrant renter is simply expulsed in both cases, so what’s the difference in terms of their treatment?
 
Their second argument is that while this was once permitted, there are new laws and regulations providing justification for their removal.  Setting aside the question of whether it is justifiable to expel people on the basis of “special executive orders 红头文件,” in any event such measures should be applied to future cases, and not made retroactive.
 
The third argument is that this kind of “clean-up” targets the landlords who are renting illegally.   The renters merely have to move.  But this is even more contrived:  The majority of expelled black residents of Sophiatown were renters.  Does this mean that forcing them to move did not constitute expulsion?
 
The fourth argument is that “cleaning-up outsiders” has the support of the local population, which echoes the argument of the South African authorities:  when “white cities” expel blacks it is surely with the support of the white urban residents.
 
Among all the reasons given, only one was worthy of sympathy:  officials said that Shenzhen is the most accommodating city to migrant labor, which is why so many people flocked to Shenzhen.  But little Shenzhen cannot absorb the poor people of the entire country.  And it’s true.  If we ask that Shenzhen accept shanty-dwellers while the rest of the country drives out its poor people, this lacks fairness.  Is the conclusion that we should draw from this is that other places should be more accepting, so that Shenzhen could ratchet down the pressure?  Or should Shenzhen, the only “safe harbor,” be eliminated, so that the entire country expels the poor?
 
In fact, not only did they “clean up” the shantytown, they also performed a “transformation of the urban village” which kicked out large numbers of migrant workers, and even in the “resettlement zone” specifically built for migrant workers, expulsion was carried out at the drop of a hat.  When Shenzhen was growing rapidly, they employed vast amounts of migrant labor, and to avoid the emergence of slums in the city they build a resettlement zone on the outskirts of town, which in fact was Shenzhen’s Soweto.  This was not only perfectly legal, but widely publicized.  The Donggualing resettlement area 冬瓜岭安置区, for example, was established in the Donggualing area of Lianhua Mountain 莲花山 in Futian District 福田区 in 1992, with the approval of the Futian District Construction Bureau and the National Land and Resources Bureau, as a new temporary resettlement area. 

Officials reported that the “Donggualing model” had successfully solved the problem of living arrangements for migrant workers, calling it a “cozy nest” or a “paradise” for migrant workers.  People came from all over the country to observe and study the experiment.  But once the city was built, the government suddenly changed its mind, and the migrant workers were viewed as surplus population.  The government decided to build “welfare housing 福利房” for officials on the site (kicking out the poor to build “welfare housing” for officials is surely a classic example of “negative welfare 负福利”).  Thus on May 27, 1998, the Shenzhen government issued document number 101, proclaiming that the “Fuzhou District Donggualing Resettlement Area is reallocated to the Municipal Housing Bureau as a welfare housing construction site.”  Subsequently, on August 18 of the same year, “five functional departments carried out joint enforcement actions in the Donggualing resettlement area,” and having subdued those who resisted, destroyed 15,000 square feet of “illegal” housing and expelled 40,000 people.  On September 11, the headline of the Shenzhen Commercial Journal 深圳商报 proclaimed, “There are no ‘nails’ that cannot be pulled out!”[6]
 
Compared to South Africa, China’s practices in expelling migrant labor include the following special characteristics.  First, the scale is larger, and the measures more cruel.  The Sophiatown incident, which expelled tens of thousands, shocked the world, but it is nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands that were “cleaned up” in Shenzhen.  It took several years to carry out the expulsion in Sophiatown, while Shenzhen took care of things in only four months.  South Africa mobilized the police to move people out; Shenzhen invented “administrative burning.”  The protests of those who were expelled from Sophiatown caught the world’s attention, resulting in movies and memorial plaques, while as the commentators noted, in the case of Shenzhen, the hundreds of thousands who were expelled had no organizational resources and were “reduced to silence.”
 
Second, in China there are no limits to the scale of the expulsion.  In South Africa, after the abolition of the Western district and the construction of Soweto, or in other words, after the blacks were moved from the second ring road to the fourth ring road, they were not forced to move further away.  The later cases of Sophiatown and District Six basically took place within the cities.  The “resettlement zone” of Soweto was basically left alone.  But in Shenzhen the migrant workers were moved from the "village in the city" to the "resettlement area", and then to the "outer" village in Baoan County 宝安县. As soon as real estate developers cast their eye on a piece of land , the government trotted out its practice of "selling land to finance the government 卖地财政" and the migrant workers were “cleaned up” without negotiation. 
 
Third, after destroying Sophiatown, South African authorities resettled the poor who had been evicted, building new homes for them in Meadowland, “outside the fourth ring road.”  And some say that rents here were lower than they had been in Sophiatown.  Of course, this in no way diminishes the damage done by the expulsion:  when you move from the “second ring road” to the “fourth ring road” rents naturally go down.  And transport costs and cost of living for the black population rose, while the quality of life surely suffered. 

But in comparison, China’s “clean-up” as described above basically offered no new resettlement.  Some people publically stated that the clean-up procedure was designed to get rid of 淘汰 “people unsuited to live in Shenzhen.”  According to statistics, two thirds of those who were expelled were forced to leave Shenzhen, and the remaining third was forced into a “guerilla war” posture.  “Some people retreated to the valleys next to the gardens of Moon Bay, living among the lychee trees, while others built primitive shanties on the remains of the destruction.”  These people were much worse off than those removed from Sophiatown!
 
Fourth, China is much more capricious.  South African laws were bad laws, but they rarely changed overnight.  The pass law was bad, but if you had a pass they didn’t arrest you.  In China, by contrast, just as those who possess the “three passes” remain subject to detention during “sensitive periods,” on the question of “cleaning up illegal construction” the authorities do whatever they please.  Today they set up a “resettlement zone,” and tomorrow they call it illegal.  They are always right no matter what.
 
No one has ever envied those who live in a slum.  Nelson Mandela once described Alexandra, a black slum in Johannesburg, as follows:  “The roads there are unpaved, and dirty, hungry, malnourished children run around half naked.  The air is thick with smoke.  Several households share a water faucet, and the stagnant water alongside the road emits a pungent stench. Because there is no electricity, Alexander is seen as a ‘black town'. It’s very dangerous to walk home at night....Terrible violence occurs constantly. Life is cheap here. There are frequent armed robberies and violent incidents in the night.”
 
No one could be satisfied with such a situation.  But isn’t it even more cruel to expel people from such poor areas instead of letting them be?  For this reason, faced with the white authorities’ decision to “clean up the slums,” the black elite in South Africa always insisted on blacks’ rights to residence in the slums, and led the struggle to maintain those rights.  As Mandela pointed out:  “Although life in Alexandra is hell, it is also a place to get rich.  It is one of very few places in South Africa where Africans can amass private property and manage their own wealth.  Here, Africans do not have to bow their heads to white municipal authorities.  Alexandra is fertile soil for hope, testimony to our people’s having broken through barriers so as to remain permanently in the city.  To keep black people in the villages or in the mines, the white government argued that blacks are by nature village people, not suited to urban life.  While there are many problems in Alexandra, it has debunked this shameless lie. Alexandra’s residents come from all African tribes, and have the political consciousness necessary for urban life.  Urban life helps to break down the conflicts between tribes and peoples.”
 
It is time for us to hear these words!
 


Notes

[1] Available online at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/33585.html , published on Aisixiang on May 12, 2010.

[2] English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm .

[3] English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm .

[4] English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htm .

[5] Translator’s note:  Qin Hui surely means the British priest Trevor Huddleston (1913-1998) who was an anti-apartheid activist personally involved in the events in Sophiatown, and who wrote a well-known book on his experiences entitled Naught for your Comfort.

[6] Translator’s note :  “Nail houses”      钉子户 is the Chinese term for houses that refuse to sell to developers, and hence stick out “like nails” as the construction proceeds around them.  See images here:  https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development .