News reports on brutal demolition grace front pages quite often these days, and here we have yet another: In Mianyang, Sichuan Province, to force the last resident to leave her home, demolition contractor tore the stairs away, ergo the strange gutted-out structure on the cover of today’s Wuhan Morning Post.
The building were previously home to the employees of a local state-run factory. After the factory went bankrupt, the land was sold to developers to pay back its debt. However, the residents, generally feeling under compensated, initially refused to leave but after some of them got beaten, they yielded.
Except Zhao Yanhong, whose apartment was on the top floor. She stayed until the new year eve of 2011, when she woke up to find that the stairs were gone. Though Zhao managed to get back to the ground, she said that all her belongings were left behind in her apartment which is still perching precariously on the top of the remaining structure.
- Wuhan Morning Post (Chinese): Worker’s apartment becomes garden in the air