So, the Nail House in Chongqing is gone. The owners finally reached a satisfactory agreement with the developer, news reports said, achieving their their aim of getting a commercial property instead of cash compensation. The most interesting aspect of this case (which we wrote about earlier, like every other reporter in China) was the fact that it was so heavily covered, particularly on the internet, which dragged in old media on its coattails. All the light and heat generated by the case had reporters and editors scrambling to find some significance beyond the fact that it had garnered so much coverage. Some tried to link the incident to the property law passed earlier in March by the National People’s Congress. But the law hasn’t come into effect and its not clear whether it would have made a difference if it had been. Still others attempted to go the traditional human interest route. Problem was the couple were a bit quirky but by no means the sort of oppressed, penniless grandparents being screwed by an evil developer who would have made the story juicy. They appear to be a stubborn, media savvy, adequately well-off couple who wanted more moolah. One paper even wrote (thanks as ever to the indefatigable Roland Soong for translation) about the case seeing the birth of “citizen reporters” who went to the site and then blogged about what they saw afterwards. I’m willing to wait and see if this is really the beginning of a revolution that sees China’s tens of millions of netizens allowed to report live from disaster sites, the NPC, mass protests over land acquisitions etc etc, but for the moment I remain skeptical, to put it mildly.
In short, the Chongqing Nail House was actually more like Paris Hilton than anything else, famous for being famous. Full of sound and fury…….signifying nothing.