weather turns warmer and more and more berliners had outdoors for a bike ride or throw the hope for more carefree summer, including the imperative beer garden experienced its top football all around it. watching the w news from berlin. we've got a documentary for you coming up now on china's cities. we're looking at the competition for living space there. i'm terry martin for me and all of us here at the w. thanks for watching. ah, the staying in language courses, the video and audio anytime. anywhere, dw printer ah,

the china cities are growing at a breathtaking pace. the mecca metropolises with glittering facades for the own trowbridge. what the major cities really want, the way they're thinking is to have the highest and if you call them that the high end population, more and more chinese, moving from the country to the city. beyond the shiny high rises the streets and narrow loud and dirty. there is no regulation or law in china that protects the tenant rights. homeowners are expropriated, forced to yield to the construction boom, building spaces in high demand. those left behind have no legal recourse, they become desperate. my house is gone, torn down,

everything's gone. the china struggle for living space li cheese is ready to defend his home. to the last the china as such does not have a particularly dense population. vantage sprawling urban agglomeration. ah, it is with millions of inhabitants are practically sprouting up over night. make us it is modern, glamorous, and fuller to poundage is in 198020 percent of china's population lived in cities today. that figure has risen to 60 percent over 800000000 people.

no country in the world has as many large cities with over 1000000 inhabitants. china has more than one good. experts expect, dan figured to double in just a few years. the german architect actual optic moved to china. as its boom was well underway. he has lived and worked here for 11 years. i like that. of course everyone thinks you will find your fortune in the biggest cities, jane, shanghai engine. that's where the big money is when it's part of the chinese dream to live and work in the big dazzling cities. but most of the former rural residents looking for work can't afford to do so. millions of them are constantly on the move as migrant workers. this is my 1st why would you accept because there is not just a few of them at several 100 millions and i think it wouldn't have me on as well. i don't know the exact number sizes, even about 2 or 300000000 people,

maybe more constantly wandering from one place to the next to make money because they can't at home can adult. and i gets a for the holiday they can get for the that comes in there, they could only work in the fields. it's, i don't even that isn't so easy anymore because so much land is so contaminated, it's become completely infer tile. and liberal exodus has led to rapidly increasing rents in cities. in 2017 an apartment in beijing cost about $620.00 euros in rent. whereas the average salary of the paging official was around 1400 years, barely twice the rent. ah, by comparison a migrant worker and around 455 years a month in 2017. making a city apartment way beyond his means. ah, david,

he has left at hong kong for 14 years. he has witnessed the social upheaval across china from afford these new apartments that are built these very rapidly by the ninety's were becoming really expensive and you needed to have a proper job and a proper work permit, etc, to even be able to buy property. so they were world people living and working in the city, and it was natural for them to look for spaces that accepted them where migrant and low income workers can afford to live in china. so cold urban villages, formerly real villages surrounded by fields. today they are surrounded by the city . no greater, no glass for sobs, but affordable places that mostly remain hidden from tourists. curious gaze and that's the village, just a tight urban space, almost like a large city block. just packed with migrant.

ah, hardship, the megacity shinji and we managed to film one of these poor neighborhoods. here, people live in cramped quarters. under the most difficult conditions. filming is not officially allowed. the one granted permission to capture the dark side of china's economic if you renting a room in a very central village, it might be more than one on the outskirts. but you could find a room, maybe a share, and you'd pay 202300, maybe $500.00 reading be per month. you know, 4050 euros or something like that. 50 years for a place to sleep in a dorm compared to 620 for an entire apartment. we want to learn more about the living conditions for the residents here. ms. lee shows us her apartment. she and her husband and daughter share 7 square meters. although she and her husband both

have jobs, they can't afford anything larger me. at least they have a window that's not always the case. they have to pay for electricity, water, even school life in the city is expensive. me the room costs $100.00 euros per month. home outside the urban village is out of the question. other residents also show us their spaces. although we try to be as inconspicuous as possible, we get called several times. no cameras allowed. we stop filming. china is a surveillance state, but the police can't be everywhere. but it needs 4 areas. we stand out as foreigners, all of them all. me, professor for architecture. john do works at hong kong university. she specializes

in large metropolitan areas and urban villages. there are urban, religious, every single china, every single city, some has hundreds, some has thousands, some have a handful. for decades, the chinese government has considered urban villages to be eyesores. that hindered progress and modernization they went to vanish from the city state me and make room for the new modern way of living. make room skyscrapers and shopping malls so urgently needed that the urban villages are to make way for them and the residence they hardly put up any resistance. they know there is little point in standing up to the government. so they pack up what they own and move on. most of the reasons why

a government would want to be part of a demolition processed and demolish and urban that is because there is that either the government or develop her deems much better and more valuable use for the land. municipal government say the inhabitants of the urban villages should they take their homes voluntarily and also then in the way of potential investors. severance payments often make it easier to let go. but those who still refuse to leave, i'll put under massive pressure we learned while that meant in long jo in 2012. i met the rebel field marking a former urban village. we met last year. she had been arrested for not abandoning hope on. he told me to write a confession. i was so scared and i don't write well,

i told him i couldn't write. then a fellow prisoner wrote something for me. here . she told me it was my official objection to the demolition of the house followed us. yes, i thought i was very frightened. i was confused and i just wanted to get out of the even death would have been better when the police were so cruel. they had stun guns. i was terrified. that's why i just signed signed and they let me go and let them right and research a david bender, sky knows many cases like the jazz he was in one joe himself in 2012. you can

see in many cases like this, you can see the absolute desperation and it varies from village to village, but many people are, in this case, they are, they have nowhere to go. there is no future for them. no pensions, no place to live, their community is gone and they feel just desperate with forced signature lee j, who can neither read nor write formally agreed to the demolition of. she received no compensation and her signature unwittingly waved any later claim to it. so here i am, i say with one person, one day someone else, the next. what can i do? my house has gone torn down. everything has gone. well i can do is hang around here . what else is do to do is if they wanted me did

the day off to the j jumped off the roof of building and killed me. it is a lot of people are jumping off apartment towers. and if you've lived in the same place for sometimes more than 6 generations, and then it's hard to comprehend when one day someone shows up and says is over and you have to leave. or you're no longer welcome even that you have to make way for something else. a highway or elliptic stadium or just another high rise and fucking lease developments were particularly extreme in shin gym in 1980 paramount leader dang chow. pain proclaimed one of china's 1st special economic zones in what was then a small town, just under $59000.00 inhabitants. between 980-2010. according to a un report,

jane was the fastest growing city in human history. the city devoured the neighboring farmland and engulfed entire villages. the today, official figure station jane has over 12000000 inhabitants. in reality, it's probably more than 16 surrounding agricultural areas is still being reason does building lined by decree. the urban villages within the city are also expected to make way for lucrative new buildings along the path from the central government . all village land inside a certain vicinity now become nationally owned, meaning the land is no longer owned by the villages. they're owned by the government. so this is done by law, by national law. so you cannot say it's illegal. you could say it's legality. the correctness of the law, we can argue, but it's, it's a national law. so therefore,

the villagers found themselves to overnight, not only this government decree and the 1990, is stated that in good cultural land belonged to the state farm is killing the land. had no other option than to give in to the states wishes to land into money. the for the loan from collectively which is rural and into and belongs to the collective of the community. and they transfer it into basically state owned land, state use land, which means it can be developed for. and then they basically auction off the land often to private developers. well, or state links to often state own developers, big companies that then build apartments and infrastructure in this kind of thing.

in the end, all the farmers were left with where the houses in the village center and the chinese law. these belong to the collective of all villages, and as such, cannot be expropriated as easily villagers living in the local villages in the city. the urban villages recognize the huge economic opportunity. i will take my one or 2 story apartment on my plot of collective land, and i will build it to 78 stories. as much as much real estate as i can get right. and i will rent it to migrant families or individual migrants coming in. and so this is what happened, they became landlord, the farmers, deprived of their fields, had to find creative ways to make money. they built their houses as cheaply and efficiently as possible, as high as the foundations would carry it still common practice to day. and there's even a word in china. the word for farming is john

b to to farm the land. and they talk about joe fun to, to farm home to farm house. the new landlords have to build up these hazard living space quickly to be able to rent it out as soon as possible. building regulations like those, the glittering mountain policies must adhere to have no bearing here. it's true that when you go into these urban villages, often it's very dark. the electrical grid is basically all jerry rigged. if you have wires just crossing each other, they look like spiderwebs, you know, in this kind of almost cave like environment. the reason for this kate, like environment is because on the 1st floor they build a certain level, there may be 3 meters between the buildings as a kind of loose regulation, right? they can't be too close together. you need some, some access for,

for fire vehicles. if you need them, and then the 2nd level they build in, because they want to maximize the space, the floor space to rent more square footage or square meters means more income. so you get this kind of compression from the space until when you're on the bottom level and you look up, it's just a crack of sunlight and they call this issue and 10 or a line of sky in chinese. it's almost seen like sing light under a closed door. it's just a little bit. and so imagine that you have open sewers, who's kind of burbling, open sewers that smell like sewage. so i think a lot of people walking into the space and say, you know, this is unacceptable for urban living. we are in the oven village of buy showed joe once again we have no permit to shoot. it's loud and stifling. the humidity condenses on the size of the buildings. the houses are overcrowded

and the narrow dark alleys reek of old food mold and urine. i, many of the buildings don't have working toilets, running water or a washing machine. a luxury is hardly any one here can afford the up and villages are scattered throughout the inner cities of china's major cities. their inhabitants paid the price for their country's boom. and their reminded of that every day he, even by those who were less unfortunate, even in the city election june the president public image is that they're all dirty . they're all on sanitary, they're all bad. that, that is the public image. there's no wage workers who live have a major contributors to the cities economic flourishing. yet even so, they are

a thorn in the side of the government. the. they want to build a profitable apartment, buildings there, and they want to sell the land for a lot of money to developers. because this is a primary source of revenue still for many cities and try that. it's not tax revenue, income tax, it's, it's revenue from land sales. huge profits are to be had in the property and housing market in major chinese cities. by the summer of 2019 average property prices in shan, jen has skyrocketed compared to 10 years earlier in beijing. they also ro, sharply land for construction, is becoming increasingly st gas. and anyone who snaps it up cheap can expect a handy profit to ation. where is the term and to get the, the land of the villagers, and they don't want to pay a fair price for that plant. they want it cheap so they can sell it at a profit to the all over the country. the government forces urban villages to give

way to new construction projects. in the name of progress, local protest is mostly in bay police city administrations. and building contractors form a powerful alliance. something the public shouldn't be aware of. the land is not owned by individual visitors. the land is collected loan by the village. so what that means is that the village collective in some cases is a handful of elderly men, whole a lot of power in negotiation. so most of the times when it is a negotiation between the developer or government about the fate of certain village, they are not going to all the villagers. they're going to say the representative of the village, which usually is the village elders. the village collected the villages or at the mercy of their representatives, negotiating skills, and they don't always act in the best interest of the community. again and again,

negotiations take place completely behind the backs of the homeowners concerned. there's been examples where the villagers have no idea the, the head of their village. quite a company has signed an agreement with a developer to sell their village and they took the money and left china. in recent years, hundreds of thousands have been forced out of their homes and up and villages. only a few dare to take a stand. one of them is li, tga in quantico. he is pitted against the city administration and a powerful contractor. his family has lived in the urban village of young g for generations. once it was a farming village with 3000 inhabitants. now it has become home to over 70000 migrant workers in the middle of the financial district of one jo. please

a little while they tearing down so early at 6 am because they want to do it in secret. we 1st met lee, his wife, and 2 children in 2012 se or the last remaining residence in their building. not long ago, 50 people share the same roof. they had come to the city from the countryside in the hope of a better life. lee jones family as own the house and the surrounding plot of land for generations. he has documents to prove it. oh, john, this is a title deed from the 32nd year of the republic of china, the way stands. that will be 1943. you only read in the 8th month of the moon. only 70 years ago. she's the 70 years. she's older than the communist party. those are older than the people's republic of china . don't. don't quite look, war locked me. this document is not just

a title deed. it also shows that lee is officially a rural citizen with fewer rights in the city. so china has a system of what's called household registration, where the people are actually registered to their either urban or rural area of usually birth system data to the 1950s. at that time, every household had to make a decision. rural meant that they were entitled to a plaza planned for subsistence farming, urban guaranteed a workplace, subsidized housing, access to education and health care, and the pension. vaguely speaking, lee jones is a resident outside the up and village he lives and he has no right to use public saturdays unless he manages to buy an apartment in the city. mm. but until you purchase a property in a city,

you cannot get your local registration card. you what's called the who call. you just do not have local registration, which means it's almost impossible to get into local schools. your kid will not have a school and you won't have access to health care. compensation for the house would help ease the families desperate financial situation. they could stay in the city by an apartment register and find one walk li sean wants that neither the city administration nor the building contract will hear anything of it. and he went back down great letters film, his struggle that night the utility lines to his house had cut off the what. what was, what was what

was the power here come the police that most of them no one expects any help from the police. the family is forced to improvise. water is only available at the edge of what has become a desert, a rubble to get there. they have to run a gauntlet of angry construction workers, a generator supplies. the family with electricity is always on guard and hasn't left the house for months. ah, he's heard of cases where construction workers have been quick to deal with residents like him and that scares him. but he wants to hold out until the end for himself and his family. and this is why you have the whole phenomenon of what we call nail houses, or,

or chinese things who individual land own property owners. they call the owners villagers who decide they're going to stay in their property, that they're going to hold out and wait for proper compensation by going head to head with the local property company and city leaders. and they stated, they call them nail houses because they're like nails that can't be pulled out. there are hundreds of nice houses in china. some of them have even made the front pages of international newspapers assigned a change that is usually broken at some point. the chances of winning the battle are slim. the other side is too powerful, and people evicted from their homes are often injured in the process shown. how's this and his gearing up as if the battle, the

a you can throw that out the window. it has a brick as an anchor. oh then i can light the fuse and run away home and you saw the leech usually has prepared enough homemade explosives to bring it all down. if anyone gets in they won't make it out alive. he films himself as he places them throughout the building. the that fuses for this road. this is for the stairs one for down the 2nd floor. the entrance there is some issue that when they're in the rooms on the ground floor and

disconnects the gas to the roof, the bombs on the roof here. and here everything is labeled. if you're going to do it, you have to do it right? so the individual nail hauser who basically arms his, his 6 story building as an explosive device, ready to go off as soon as his home is invaded, is only the mirror image of the violent city government that's in cahoots with the property developer that will cut your electrical lines and beat up your relatives and harassed your kids on the way to school. the tactics aren't very different on either side. both sides are resorting to violence and the threat of violence to get what they want. it's the law of the jungle. the cheese jones resistance has put the construction work month behind schedule. tension is rising at the building site. the policies past their frustration on to their employees. if nothing gets built,

no one gets paid. the 1st workers lose their patience and attack a former neighbor. lee jones stuck in his own home can't come to aid the police arrive, but don't intervene. you police are all crooked. nothing but small time crooks. the big crooked, the corrupt official. what you just represent the government, you only say whatever the government tells you to. i tell the truth, what was go ahead and write me up. don't charge me with whatever you want. i've already been to court. you only act in the interest of the government and your name . your job is to defend the law my. but you don't think officially all homeowners in the village and proceed generous compensation. lee cheese young denies this and speaks of corrupt officials embezzling funds. sure,

the government has paid out money, he says, but it doesn't seem to care who gets it. ah, there are lots of examples of corruption in the area, including the government would provide a certain amount per month, certain number, yet per person, per resident of the village, per month for a period of 3 years, for example, from loss of livelihood as they took farm land, right, because this was the source of livelihood and i had documents for the time that that were provided by people to me that would show that basically the head of the village hadn't had over reported the number of villagers eligible. so you look at the roster of the population of the village and what was reported to city authorities with all the stamps from the county level from this office, from the for everyone who are probably involved to, to over report the amount of compensation that was due but where did the compensation go? for years,

corruption has been one of china's most serious problems. and the government is determined to tackle it. it seems to spread everywhere, even into the housing market in to the majority of people in the city elections. and they would say the villagers got hit the lottery that then that most of the villagers, in fact, in exchange for the land or in change for the building did receive an enormous amount of money. the cheese young swears he has yet to see a single one. but after months such psychological warfare, he has given way a little his wife and 2 children have moved into a small one room apartment in another urban village. its still standing from now on, leach shown is on his own. he's not sure if he will ever see his family again. the only thing he certain knows is that the construction workers will continue to

pressure him if need be with folks. me, it's a huge, it's a huge problem because they learn from the system that violence is what solve the problem. each night we want change the construction company, send out another gang of hooligans. they throw rocks at the windows and make sure the few remaining residents come find any rest new mon. as soon as the thug up here, the police surface. as long as the thugs day, the police never show up. to me it's been over 60 weeks at lee cheese is completely worn out. sleep is out of the question. the risk is too great

that he might miss an attack and not be able to defend himself. to see me and i'm just, i don't know if it's day or night the construction company usually attack after midnight. also they smash windows being on doors in the home. i see it's constant chaos on child show when they put us kneelhauss residents under such enormous pressure to do such jobs. and she said it's past midnight now. so i guess for in the morning,

she'll probably strike again around 5 o'clock. he feels condemned to sit and wait for months. he's defended his home like a fortress. the broken windows are closed off with mantle roads and wouldn't hardly any daylight cast iron in his previous life. lee was his simple work. now he's pacing down a huge enemy in a war of attrition. stability is used as a justification in going after these resisting villagers. they're seen as dangers, right? but the upshot of this kind of conflict, i think, is a real instability. the fact that they can't protect the rights of these villagers in a, in a, in a systematic and, and fair way. the situation became desperate in

2013 after more than a year of conflict. one morning, the demolition company arrived with heavy equipment. li use the camera, we gave him to document what was happening to the didn't. so the nail house, when he couldn't think of anything else to do, he dialed the number of the citizens hotline. the. what does the engine go by his vision?

i don't know. why do you go by what a bowl? 5 junior lava. 5 full of young. i'm all do things out there. you gotta you can i woke up all regardless. even if you want you to walk over

the situation threatens to spiral out of control. we retreat to safety. the construction workers force away into the nail houses, intent on beating lee cheese young and his last remaining neighbors out of the house technically than against the law. so they trying to do it as quickly and quietly as possible. the men find back an estimate as self made explosives the loud and anything but subtle

the noise caused by the explosive devices and leave loud cries, make the thugs call off their attack. lee cheese, young, stubborn battle might be an exception to the rule, but he's not the only one. all over china. protests against the demolition of the

urban villages have been growing for more than 10 years. the demonstrators often wear the red hat that signify membership in the ruling communist party, who would dare use islands against them. ah, protests attract attention both abroad and in china itself. mm. collect the community with basically turn into collective action. cannot even just that village after village, but village to village villages linking with other villages that were facing similar problems, sharing information about how to protest, what are the effective ways, what are the legal ways, what are the sort of you know, in terms of protest or petitioning, you know, how does it work? what's the effective ultimately lead to young succeeded. in his

case, his loud protest led to an amicable settlement. the construction company finally offered him a sum that he could accept. he won't say how much but his struggle left behind scope to this day li live in constant fear over events. i what's the knife for me to win? what if they come after me? what would i do without it? i can't defend myself and armed. yes, but those nice i'm ready. if they attacked me, they'll pay for it. that's what you think. sonya no chance without a knife. who john town was president of the people's republic of china for 10 years. g g and ping became his successor. in march 2013,

he announced he would take notice of action against corruption and the situation has improved the homeowners from the slums. there are no rules for compensation, but a very widely from one region to the next. we have no way of knowing to what extent they are actually complied with. human being paid are insanely high forms, mostly by living space, not just here and elsewhere in other regions and is building a whole number of conflict. so those are the demolition, develop and villages has decreased. but that doesn't mean circumstances have improved for the roughly 300000000 low income and migrant workers. the raising of entire slum neighborhoods has left countless homeless ah, the migrant workers who suffered if they what if you want to see it that way under

these poor conditions or in another urban village. further out of the city, they have to commute further for their job at the supermarket that these handful of rich, who now live their shop in, you know, so. so it's a, it's a really kind of this vicious, vicious cycle. china's real estate boom continues in 2017. a typical apartments in jen jen cost $41.00 times the average annual salary. by comparison in the german city of munich, it cost 13 years salary. as a result, 22 percent. nearly a quarter of apartments in china empty because nobody is willing or able to pay the rent. or because the owners hope the price will increase even further. $50000000.00 vacant apartments, and there's no end in sight. now b gene is set to merge with y ro, changing quite parts of her bay tie. and so it will form a huge trying and the population is expected to grow to an estimated 60,

to 70000000. you mentioned, i don't know if that will happen, but if the past 10 to 11 years or any guide, so it's entirely possible. it's our going to school time. the shortly after expectations had risen to 130000000 by 2030 expense estimate that 80 percent of the population will live in cities. but none of this would have been possible without low wage workers. and for them, one question is becoming ever more pressing. at what cost? ah, the truth to the chief of the new crew tried the more expensive the novel metal becomes, the deeper illegal gold miners penetrate the recently and rain for the guardians of the forest. the more local have barely any chance of protecting the

world. global 3090 minutes on d. w. and then many portion of labs for now in the world right now, climate change very cost the story. this is much less the way form just one week. how much was going to really get we still have time to. i'm doing what, subscribe. we don't want to see them. what they are there. rise to the on the scene. our new global 3000 theories about the threats we are facing. and the heroes taking

a stand for over $3000.00 june 21st on d. w. in the the who's this is dw news live from berlin. beijing announces a major policy shift to try to boost the countries birth rate, china scraps the existing limit on 2 children per family. it says married couples can have 3 if they want as a rapidly aging population threatens economic growth. also coming up after the congo volcano, we're russian, we meet the children, lost in the chaos,

and the volunteers doing all they can to take care of them. fresh revelations about us efforts to spy on germany's liter.