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.