“China’s property sector, with its forced evictions and sometimes bloody confrontations, has long been described as something akin to a war zone. Now a team of online volunteers, led by an anonymous Chinese blogger, has launched a map-based project that brings that simile into stark relief.
“Called ‘the Blood-Stained Housing Map,’ the project uses Google Maps to plot violent housing evictions and land grabs across the country. ” (Josh Chin, Wall Street Journal)

The _Bloody Map_ project was launched on October 8, 2010, inspired by a forced eviction case that took place that autumn afternoon—the village of Baihutou, at Beihai, Guangxi, was going to be demolished.

I got the idea from our talking on Weibo (a Chinese twitter-like site). That night, I registered the anonymous ID “Xuefangditu, or Bloody Map” on Gmail, and used the e-mail address on that site. I edited six cases on the map in the first night and released it on Weibo as “Xuefangditu”.

In the following week, I collected reports on forced evictions in which people died in the previous few years. The first case I found on the Internet happened in 2003. Friends and strangers noticed the map, and from the second week they started to help. More and more strangers wrote to me, providing reports or cases that had not yet been reported. I also got an e-mail from the son of a man who had died for their house years before. He told me he cried when he found his father's name was on my map.

We recorded about 80 cases by the end of October, and the media noticed the project. It attracted many reports, from state-owned Xinhua agency to Nanfang News, but only two days later no one could talk about it in the media. People could not even search it as a key word for a couple of months, and my original account on Weibo was also removed.

We set up a QQ group for volunteers, which allows people to talk and exchange information—most of them are reporters, lawyers and people who have suffered or are still suffering from forced evictions.

A graphic Wikipedia of land-grab thuggery, the open version of this project has so far attracted more than 760,000 views and over 200 contributions. Users have used a variety of icons to describe different types of property-related violence: volcanoes for mass protests, beds for when property owners were killed, and flames for when those resisting eviction set themselves on fire.


Links: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=212261269395391329707.0004921f02f43f6c4f07e&ll=35.317366, 111.357422&spn=16.751302, 43.286133&z=5

The open version of _Bloody Map_ of land-grab thuggery, the open version of this project has so far attracted more than 760,000 views and over 200 contributions. Users have used a variety of icons to describe different types of property-related violence: volcanoes for mass protests, beds for when property owners were killed, and flames for when those resisting eviction set themselves on fire.