Why don't we stand out and fight?

Around a month ago, I was informed that there was a plan to build a nursing home for old people in the five empty apartments on the first floor of the apartment building where I am staying and the adjacent one where my sister is staying. We were all outrageous partly because neither of us was asked for opinion regarding this and partly because we had never heard a ridiculous plan like this.

We respect the need of old people. And we also believe it is a good idea to build more facilities catering to the needs of senior citizens. But it sounds absolutely absurd to build a nursing home in a residential building.

The initiator of this whole plan was the government organization of the community. The government has been encouraging projects designed to serve for the old and is willing to allocate a large sums money to support this kind of project. Consequently, many official organizations spare no effort to encouraging this type of project.

What I will state in the following is what I was told by a few residents in our community. Like many other communities in China, there is a relatively big and stable group of senior citizens doing square dance regularly on the pointed square in my neighbourhood. One of the officials from the local community initiated a picnic in a park for these amateur dancers. During the activity, this official announced that they were going to establish an activity center in the apartment buildings to afford better service for the old in this neighborhood. All the old present cheered for this seemingly wise decision. The official claimed that it would be an activity center for the old while later on the official announcement they stated there would be beds and medical staff as well. Additionally, this so-called activity center which is going to be run and supervised by a private company with generous fund from the government is expected to serve all the old living nearby rather than just the old in our housing estate.

Later, a few representatives from the committee of property owners were asked to meet the government officials in the local community. According to a voice record (there is indeed a voice record which I had listened to) of the meeting, these government officials were rather firm regarding their determination to set up this activity center. Some of them even threatened these delegates who partly compromised to the power of government and who partly reckoned this project was actually good.

So what this committee of property owners did was to put up an announcement to collect opinions from residents in this community. It clearly states that all the delegates in the community had passed this proposal unanimously. They even attached a very precise plan for the renovation work, which was absolutely absurd as they must had been planning this for a very long time. Otherwise, it would have been impossible for them to submit such a detailed plan for this project. The members of committee released this announcement to avoid future accusation because they didn't want to be accused of not informing the residents. They put up the announcement in a place that not many people usually pay attention to. And after the wide criticism among the residents, they took it off before the supposed time. Because of this, the majority of residents in this housing estate knew absolutely nothing about this.

I soon friended with quite a few residents in my apartment building and treated this as my top priority. I called the president of the committee to ask about this who told me that he would go to negotiate with the government organization for this community. I found this whole thing so ridiculous that I found it hard to contain my anger. As a result, I called the hotline of major which is set up for local citizens to report all sorts of problems. Also I called a hotline of law to ask for help. I then shared what I had found with other residents in our different Wechat groups.

But, shockingly, not many people knew this and they claimed that they didn't see the announcement, which is totally expected considering what the committee did with the notice. But what was thoroughly despondent was that most of them didn't care at all because the activity center was not gonna be built on their apartment building and because they were simply not interested.

With this activity center just a few floors down my flat, I was seriously concerned. I tried to instigate more residents to pay close attention to this by repeatedly stating how our rights were infringed and how we should stand out to fight for our rights . It unfortunately didn't work very well.

Afterwards, we were asked to do a residents’ opinion poll which was the result of the negotiation mentioned above. We believed this was essential for us to win this. So I with a few other residents in our building searched every floor, explained this project and then asked residents for opinion. We also called the residents who were then in a different city. We finished the poll for our building within a short period of time. But except for my apartment building and my sister’s, all the other buildings were very slow in doing their poll, which was not surprising though.

In order to make the poll work, we needed to get as many votes against this project as possible according to property law. There are around 20 apartment buildings in this housing estate. With only few of them that had finished the poll, it didn't look promising for us. So a few hospitable residents including me and my sister decided to help with the other buildings to do the poll so as to make this poll an effective one.

We in the end won the poll and the government organization of the community claimed that they would stop the project.

Here I'd like to confess something I was and still am not proud of: when trying to get as many votes against this project, I and many other residents manipulated the information we offered for the other residents. We secretly agreed that we would only mention the negative points of this project, leaving any positive points out. This was nothing smart or glorious. But what they did first in my personal opinion was even more despicable.

We are still so far from our ideals of democracy. I thank all those who have fought hard for all the rights I am currently enjoy. They must have sacrificed so much to achieve the current state. Next time, when we are faced with a problem, I think we'd better take some actions instead of just sitting around and waiting for some people to fix it. When everybody thinks this way, the problem will never be fixed. What we want and want to see in this world doesn't just happen to us. Some people have once stood out and fought really hard for it.