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.