On a baking hot Beijing summer day, the air thick with haze, a curious crowd jostles around a narrow two-story building in a prosperous neighborhood close to Tiananmen Square. It stands alone, surrounded by rubble. Thick padlocks hang on the front door. Signs and banners plastered over its shuttered front windows proclaim in Chinese "This Is Illegal!"

The building contains a restaurant on the first floor and a family home on the second. When I walk to the door and ask about the signs, Sun Ruonan, a woman with a flat face and meaty arms, wades out from the center of the crowd, opens the padlocks, ushers me inside, then locks the door again. “There are police all around watching us,” she says under her breath.

Sun’s family ran the now-closed restaurant and has lived or worked in this building for more than a century. But earlier in 2007, local officials posted a notice evicting Sun and her sister and announcing that the building would be torn down. They said that Beijing was turning the land into green space for the 2008 Olympics and that the marathon might be routed through it. The government offered the family members compensation, but they refused to leave, claiming the money promised was far less than the market value of the property. “We have the property rights of the house. We know it,” Sun says. “I don’t want money. I want justice.”

Sun had heard about other people fighting evictions, so she and her sister, Sun Ruoyu, began reading up on the law and sending letters to local officials. No one responded. Then the two women took a more direct approach: They plastered their home with banners and signs, hoping to draw crowds and possibly local media. One day, when a bulldozer arrived to start demolishing their house, Sun’s sister climbed onto the machine, forcing it to stop. So far, their strategy has worked: Their battle has been chronicled by the international press, and the building still stands. Sun isn’t taking any chances though. “The tables and cupboards have been stripped bare, so there’s nothing valuable here,” she says. “We’re afraid that all these things will be destroyed.”

Similar protests are sweeping across China. As real estate values soar and land becomes a red-hot commodity, everyone from wealthy developers to government officials is grabbing property. But a rising number of middle-class homeowners, like the Sun sisters, are fighting back. In Shanghai and Beijing, demonstrators protesting evictions have paraded through streets and blocked roads. Earlier in the summer, about 20,000 protesters rioted in the town of Shengzhou after security forces tried to compel families to leave their land, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a Chinese human rights group. (The families had been offered some compensation, but they claimed it was too little.) One 90-year-old woman who refused to move reportedly climbed atop her building and waved gasoline bombs at the authorities. Two years ago, in the southern village of Dongzhou, locals who were furious about the lack of compensation for land taken from them attacked police, brandishing bombs and knives. Firing back, police shot and killed 20 people, by some estimates, though the official government report acknowledges three deaths. The Dongzhou case and others dominated the Chinese blogosphere for months.

In the past decade, China has been shaken by several waves of demonstrations, but the land protests have the potential to be the most transformative—in part because of the demographics of the revolutionaries. This is not just an uprising of peasants or downtrodden workers. Many of the foot soldiers are urban professionals—lawyers, business owners, and managers who have gained confidence and wealth during China’s economic boom. They have resources, access to the internet, and knowledge of how the government works.

In the picturesque city of Hangzhou, residents hold clandestine meetings to talk about property rights and launch petitions to the local government, publicizing their cases and trying to get media attention. They work with lawyers who specialize in land issues and sue developers. They write anti-eviction slogans on their clothing and parade through town. Among the people advising them is Li, a corporate manager (he asks me not to use his full name), who says local authorities forced him to surrender his house and, in return, gave him housing in a far less desirable neighborhood. Li gave up on his own case after his complaints to officials went unanswered, but he says, “I’m concerned about similar cases,” adding that “citizens have high education in Hangzhou. Most of the people know about land-rights issues in other places. They know from the internet.”

Some activists think the land protests will climax at this summer’s Olympics in Beijing. There, the city government had made plans to tear down some 60,000 houses a year, evicting 1.5 million people, in part to build Olympic sports facilities, luxury shopping complexes, entertainment districts, and residential areas, according to a report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, a research group in Geneva. These evictions have led to protests not only over the destruction of homes but also plans to build a new waste treatment facility and the refurbishment of a state television station that will cover the Games.

Very few of the evictions in China would qualify as legal in other countries, and even in China the legality is murky. Because the state technically owns all urban land and the average Chinese citizen simply owns the right to live on the land for a time, government officials have massive leverage on homeowners and can force them to leave their property without paying much—if anything—in compensation.

In some cases, private developers who are in cahoots with local officials have forced citizens from their homes. In 2007, China’s Ministry of Land and Resources admitted that local officials were involved in roughly 80 percent of all illegal landgrabs. The government acknowledged that there were 131,000 cases of illegal land seizure in 2006, nearly 20 percent more than in 2005.

On blogs and websites, Chinese protesters chronicle the details of their cases and relate tales of their evictions. Chinese journalists scour these sites, sometimes sneaking stories of real estate battles past the eyes of government censors and into the mainstream media. As the middle-class revolutionaries fight for property rights, their struggle may spill over into other, more controversial areas. “They are asking for more rights for their property, and they’ll wind up asking for democratic management, democratic votes, due process,” predicts Qiu Feng, a researcher at the Cathay Institute of Public Affairs in Beijing.

In Chongqing, a city of about 30 million, real estate protesters hung banners proclaiming "Govern for the People, Take Human Rights into Account," and "The People’s Interest Is No Minor Issue," according to a report by the International Federation for Human Rights, a coalition of groups based in France. Some of these slogans echo those heard during the protests of the late 1980s, when popular anger over corruption and the lack of political reform sparked a national uprising that culminated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989.

Some Chinese are convinced that the real estate rebellion will transform the country. Says Li Datong, a reformist writer in Beijing, “If they continue like this, we’ll eventually have revolution.”

The Chinese government is clearly worried. After I called a prominent Chinese land-rights activist, whose mobile phone is probably tapped, I received anonymous text messages warning me that the people I interviewed “take drugs and are destroying China’s honor.” When I called the number that the text messages had come from, there was no answer. Some citizens who had been pushed off their property refused to talk to me, and even people working tangentially on land issues seemed fearful.

Land activists have ample reason to be afraid. Police and rent-a-thugs do not hesitate to attack demonstrators. In an incident chronicled for the prominent advocacy group Human Rights in China by He Qinglian, an investigative journalist and well-known dissident, men dressed in camouflage attacked protesters at night, killing six and wounding 140. In 2006, after students at a special-needs school in Beijing tried to stop developers from demolishing the building, a group of men burst into the school, according to local media, beat children who stood in their way, and sledgehammered down the walls.

After the Communist Party took over China in 1949, it nationalized all land. When the country opened up to the West again, in the late 1970s, the government began allowing people to buy land-use rights, though in theory the state still owned the property and could take back homes, after giving some compensation, if it could claim a public interest. Because party officials had the power to determine what constituted public interest, they could confiscate virtually any land they wanted.

Thirty years ago, this tortured interpretation of property rights barely mattered. China remained an impoverished country. Rice paddies dotted Pudong, the eastern part of Shanghai, and most urban Chinese lived in simple cottages or bare housing blocks. But since the late 1970s, China has witnessed the most staggering economic development in modern history, with an annual growth rate of more than 10 percent. Multinational companies poured in. In 2003, China was the biggest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world. Where farmers once tilled in Pudong, construction crews have begun erecting an entire new city, with sleek, futuristic skyscrapers, including the Shanghai World Financial  Center, the world’s second-tallest building.

China’s prime real estate suddenly turned into gold. Now, office developers, shopping-mall magnates, construction companies seeking to build luxury apartments, multinationals needing factory space—they all desperately want land in Chinese cities. In the next four years, Shanghai alone will probably have more than 32 million square feet of prime office space. Patrick Randolph, co-director of the Peking University Center for Real Estate Law, compares real estate in today’s China to railroads in 19th-century America, the dominant industry in a land of Wild West capitalism. On lists of China’s wealthiest citizens, property developers occupy an outsize share: The latest Forbes ranking of the 400 richest Chinese has property developers holding five of the top 10 slots. A recent public offering of Soho China, a Beijing developer, raised nearly $1.7 billion, about as much as Google’s I.P.O.

China’s booming economy has also given rise to an upwardly mobile middle class, lifting more than 300 million people out of poverty from the late 1970s to 2005 and creating 120 million private-sector jobs. In the suburbs of Shanghai and Beijing, new yuppies buy into developments that resemble American gated communities, complete with mega-mansions, swimming pools, and guards. Even people with less money can buy houses. Because the country has a high savings rate—Chinese have saved more than $2 trillion—and most couples have only one child, even lower-middle-class families can afford to own homes. When some residential projects hit the market in Chinese cities, crowds gather at the developers’ offices, fighting for a chance to buy.

But party officials still control the rights to urban land. Whether they are working with a real estate tycoon or on their own, officials can fabricate an excuse to take people’s homes, pay minimal compensation, and then turn the property into luxury housing or expensive office buildings and make a fortune for themselves. Once a project is built, party officials or people with party connections can buy early at insider prices, then resell for much more. In some months, home prices in big Chinese cities rise more than 10 percent. He Qinglian, the writer and dissident, estimates that between 2001 and 2003, local governments in China made more than $120 billion from land deals. In one case she chronicled in Beijing, the city government paid families about $1.86 per square foot for their land and later sold it for more than $74 per square foot. “It’s not that the government sells the land to the developers. They are the same person,” says a Chinese property specialist who doesn’t want to be named. In other words, it’s as if New York mayor Michael Bloomberg could take someone’s apartment building, redevelop the land, and then build himself an estate in the Hamptons with the profits.

So, more and more, the demonstrators in China resemble people like Shen Ting, a fashionably dressed woman wearing crimson lipstick and a black blouse, who tells me her story at an upscale bistro, sitting near an oval bar made of glass and polished chrome. Until four years ago, Shen, who runs a clothing company, paid little attention to Chinese politics. But in April 2003, a powerful local developer named Zhou Zhengyi, who had amassed a fortune estimated at $320 million, announced he had gained permission from the government to seize her family’s home in Shanghai. She says Zhou’s company offered a price far below market value for the property, a single-room apartment in the middle of the coveted downtown neighborhood Jingan.

In a country where relationships matter more than laws, Zhou had powerful connections. Allegedly, he had befriended the heads of the Bank of China and the Shanghai Communist Party and had given the brother of the party chief shares in his company. “An eviction team told us, ‘Take care of yourself, because Zhou Zhengyi is co-developing this with the brother of the party leader,’ ” Shen recalls.

Shen refused to back down. She hired a lawyer to represent her, traveled to Beijing to deliver a petition telling her story to the central government, and joined waves of public protests in Shanghai. “I went to petition, and there were people from all over China there. This made me aware for the first time how human rights are trampled,” she says.

Soon enough, Shen discovered that once she had crossed into real estate advocacy, the state treated her just like any other political activist—maybe worse. She says men hired by the developer forced members of her family off their property. When Shen traveled to Beijing to petition, she says, thugs broke into her hotel room and beat her. She was briefly hospitalized, and shortly after her release, she says, men working for the developer cut open her bag and stole her identity papers. The government arrested other residents in Shen’s neighborhood, as well as her lawyer, a famed rights advocate named Zheng Enchong. Zheng was sentenced to three years in jail for allegedly revealing state secrets—specifically, for faxing an article produced by the Chinese news agency Xinhua to be distributed to officials at a human rights organization outside China. Then the authorities came after Zheng’s lawyer, Guo Guoting, putting him under house arrest. Guo was later forced out of the country.

China’s Communist government has proved itself an extraordinarily adaptable dictatorship. Sixteen years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the same regime still runs things, but now the party is scrambling. As property demonstrations in Shanghai escalated over the past four years, local officials finally arrested Zhou Zhengyi and courts sentenced him to three years in prison for fraud. Zhou now faces additional charges of bribery and other crimes, as well as a separate investigation in Hong Kong. The central government also removed the local party chief in Shanghai and sacked other top officials across the country who were accused of grabbing land.

The government now says that these land demonstrations threaten China, and Premier Wen Jiabao called illegal landgrabs a “historic error” that could undermine China’s social stability. In 2007, the national government launched a massive campaign to inspect real estate projects for illegal deals.

In perhaps the most significant sign that the government realizes it must change, China enacted a new property law in October. It gives property holders more rights, though Chinese legal experts say it probably won’t prevent illegal evictions. In fact, China’s legal system remains in a kind of limbo, which will most likely encourage more demonstrations. Laws on the books suggest that citizens have rights to fair compensation and to appeal evictions. But Chinese lawyers tell me that though judges hear cases, verdicts are ultimately decided by local party officials.

Even as the government makes conciliatory gestures, it continues to crack down on people who protest. Zhou Li has had a firsthand view of the violence. An outspoken activist in Beijing, Zhou talks rapidly and forcefully. Evicted from her home with no compensation, she says, after local officials claimed they needed to redevelop the area for the Games, Zhou petitioned the government, but that effort went nowhere. So recently, she has been on a mission to help other Beijing residents who have lost their land. “I found when I was petitioning that there were so many people in worse shape than me,” she says. Together with other activists, Zhou has helped organize petition drives and educate people about how to confront developers.

Qiu Feng, the property-rights expert, predicts that eventually this anger will reach a tipping point and real estate radicals will demand more than new property laws or compensation. The Olympics, designed to be China’s coming-out party as a world power, could push the protests over the edge. Determined to ensure a perfect appearance on the international stage, the Chinese authorities are taking a tough stance on Olympics-related demonstrations. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, the 2008 Olympics have been “a catalyst to extend...a continued crackdown on human rights defenders, including prominent rights-defense lawyers and those attempting to report on human rights violations.” In October 2003, Ye Guoqiang, a Beijing resident evicted from his home so that the land could be used for Olympic development, tried to call attention to his case by attempting to kill himself. On the National Day of the People’s Republic of China, Ye jumped off a bridge near the Forbidden City, the traditional palace of the emperors. He survived, but the authorities sentenced him to two years in jail for disturbing public order.

In recent months, as the buildup to the Games has begun, the pressure on activists has only increased. Yang Chunlin, a land-rights advocate, launched a petition arguing that protecting human rights is more important than hosting the Olympics. Despite the risks involved in signing, Yang got about 10,000 names. But then the crackdown came. In July, according to Chinese human rights groups, authorities detained Yang, preparing to bring him to court for subverting state power. In October, China Human Rights Defenders reported that Yang, in jail, was not allowed to see a lawyer and had been chained for days in one position.

Yang’s case is hardly unique. Zhou Li expects that in the weeks before the Olympics, police will detain her and anyone else across China who they believe might cause trouble. Many activists I spoke with plan to go underground before the Games and avoid the authorities’ pre-Olympics dragnet so they can travel secretly to Beijing to demonstrate. When the Games begin, they plan to launch protests, forcing police to arrest them in front of the world media. “Yes, of course there will be protests for the Olympics by people in Beijing,” Zhou Li says. “What other option do they have?”