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.