Adopting a model used in its rich coastal regions, China is working to develop its poor western areas, but the development push is triggering a familiar struggle over land rights.
Over the past decade, China's booming real estate market has been an engine of growth bringing spectacular wealth to well-connected developers and private home ownership to people once nurtured on government-owned housing.
Now the real estate boom is spreading inland and, despite a landmark property law introduced last year, residents are facing what they say are injustices stemming from collusion between developers and local governments.
The law, for the first time in communist China's history, made “private property” legal, giving some hope to homeowners and farmers who have for years battled against government eviction orders and low compensation.
But in a suburb of Sichuan's provincial capital of Chengdu in southwest China, about 50 families at an old closed-down plastic factory are refusing to move out of the homes they have lived in for decades.
It is a story being repeated across the fast-changing western areas, echoing problems that marginalised Chinese on the more developed east coast have endured for years and which have been one of the major causes of social unrest in China.
On a recent visit to the Chengdu suburb, banners and slogans hung from the buildings built during the backward years of Chinese communism in the early 1970s, saying, “we want transparency, justice and impartiality.”
“I have spent dozens of years working here and now I am only asking for a simple place to live,” said a man, 52, a resident in Wenjiang suburb who is refusing to move.
“I have worked all my life, but now I don't know where I am going to live. A new apartment will cost me a huge amount of money.”
According to the families, the developers are offering 8,000 yuan (US$1,140) in compensation to move out, far from enough cash to purchase another house.
“For this amount of money you could just about buy enough space to put our bed,” said one woman, who cited the going price of an apartment in Chengdu at about 3,000 yuan per square metre (10.76 square feet).
The workers also denounced what they viewed to be the collusion between the government land bureaus and the real estate industry, something that local officials adamantly deny.
“We have tried to play a role as mediators,” said Wang Qingmei, an official at Wenjiang's economic bureau.
“The developer has no links to the local government, there is no corruption involved. On the contrary, we have offered preferential policies so that the developers can offer better compensation.”
The developers have “given a lot”, Wang said, while emphasising that most of the 126 workers to be moved out have accepted the offer.
Still others are wary of the intentions of the government because, despite the new property law, China's constitution continues to maintain that “all land belongs to the state”.
While the actual apartment or building may come under private ownership, the land continues to be owned by the state. It is a principle that allows local officials tremendous powers over land-use rights.
And while the Wenjiang authorities insist their hands are clean, Chinese authorities admit corruption over land rights is a huge problem nationwide.
The official Xinhua news agency this week announced that authorities had uncovered 31,700 cases of illegal land grabs in a four-month national crackdown that began last September.
In Chengdu, a city of 11 million, government efforts to develop China's western regions through economic growth are fully apparent in the scores of real estate projects in the city centre and the suburbs.
The projects in question are clearly aimed at cashing in on the growing Chinese dream of home ownership, with advertisements promoting properties with names like “Toronto Castle” and “California Villa”.
“It was only several years ago that this was all farm land, the good earth,” said Wang Dongruo, 64, who was born in Wenjiang.
“Now houses here cost 3.6 million yuan (US$514,000),” he said with a chuckle of disbelief as he looked over at a luxury home replete with privately employed uniformed guards.