China Café

My neighbours are building new homes and renting their old houses to foreigners. But the Chinese have a slippery notion of property rights. Plus, the worst winter in 50 years
March 28, 2008
> How I became a museum consultant

The call came at 7.30am. "Mr Mark, can I take you to see my project today?" Before I could think of an excuse, Mr Fang went on. "I am waiting for you outside your coffee shop."

Mr Fang is an entrepreneur from Wukang town, half an hour's drive away. We spent the morning eating in his restaurant at the back of the mountain. It was a beautiful winter's day. Once I had been shown round the guest rooms upstairs, expressed my approval and declined to take over the place, Mr Fang took me on a tour of the valley.

He planned to set up a "holiday farm." Across a tract of paddy fields he would build bungalows, raise chickens and ducks and plant fruit trees and tea bushes. Young city folk were the target market. He would show them traditional country life.
"I am going to see a friend in Shanghai tomorrow," he said. "He wants to invest 5m yuan [about £350,000]. What should I do with it?"

To round off the tour, Mr Fang took me to the place where his parents still live. White-tiled houses were crammed along a concrete road, and at the heart of the village, overlooking the widest stretch of the street, was the sole surviving wooden farmhouse.

"That's my house," Mr Fang said. He walked up to it.

"You see these cuts in the door frame? They were made by the Taiping rebels when they tried to break in and kill everyone." (The Taipings overran southern China in the 1850s and made it their "kingdom of heavenly peace," no irony intended.) I followed him inside. "See the wallpaper? Newspapers from the second world war. The Wukang government was based here when they fled the Japanese."

It was a living, or rather a "lived in," museum. Here was tradition.

"Mr Fang, have you ever thought of using this, as a museum perhaps?"

"We were going to knock it down actually." He paused. "You're suggesting there's a business opportunity?"

"Forget 5m yuan. With just a few thousand you could…" I started.

Mr Fang has appointed me as his museum consultant.

Selling the farm

Mr Fang is not the only person with a business idea. I have also been approached by three local matrons. They wanted me to help them rent out their farmhouses.

There are two types of farmhouse in the valleys around the mountain: old wooden-framed ones like Mr Fang's, and brand new stone towers. The locals are moving from the former to the latter for obvious reasons, such as the opportunity to have windows. Thanks to the boom in bamboo prices—every family has a patch on a hillside somewhere—they can afford some very literal "home improvement" and they have been pleasantly amazed to discover that foreigners will take their old shacks off them for holiday homes. It is a perfect example of mutual benefit from cultural difference.

But there are no such things as title deeds for the houses or land registries. Property rights are established by a communal and consensual history. When foreigners turn up with wads of cash, the consensus can diversify. Try to rent space for a garden, and once you have paid, someone will appear from the other end of the village and demand compensation for his vegetable patch.
The farmhouse rental business is a perfect example in miniature of a socialist state selling off its assets. It is a lottery—and not for the faint-hearted, as one South African I know has discovered. In his one-page contract, there is a clause that allows his landlord to move back in for two weeks, upon his death, to lie in state.

A white new year

My wife, children and I spent the Chinese new year with my wife's family in Guangzhou. We only just made it. China's worst winter in 50 years began the day we left. The road to Moganshan has been cut off by snow and ice since then. Half a million people were stranded in Guangzhou.

I came back early to prepare the house and coffee shop. I had to walk the last couple of hundred metres up to the mountaintop. The snow was over my ankles.

The village seemed deserted when I arrived. The only sound, which spooked me so much that I almost turned and slid back down the hill, was a baby crying. The 200 steps from the road up to our house were covered in knee-deep virgin snow. The baby had stopped crying, thank God. All I could hear was my own breath.

The village's electricity supply was cut off. I have spent my days surviving. It is a perverse thought, and I am lucky that unlike those half million migrant workers in Guangzhou I can escape, but in a country so consumed with economic and material progress, and every other kind of progress besides, it is a secret joy to have nothing to do but keep warm, trek down the hill to Wukang for food and a shower, and fetch water from our spring. (We left the bath full as a back-up but it froze solid, like our pipes). I have been eating by candlelight every night.

Today, as I write, the electricity cables to the upper half of the village have been repaired. I have still not heard a car. I am guiltily waiting for the real world to return.