THE fuzzy pictures of a woman standing atop a roof, a red blaze of fire ringing her neck, are hard to look at.

Even more haunting are the cries of “don’t, don’t” in jerky videos shot on mobile phones of businesswoman Tang Fuzhen’s impending self-immolation.

There was something familiar about the tragic footage of the 47-year-old Sichuan homeowner who later died from her burns sustained while trying to save her three-storey home.

Two years ago, as Beijing was prettying itself for the grand Olympics, older buildings were being torn down and new ones shooting up at amazing speed.

Evictions were the necessary collateral (damage).

I watched upclose, how one family lived out what they thought were going to be their final, harried hours of their life in a two-bedroom flat in the heart of the Chinese capital.

Like Tang Fuzhen, the Suns were prepared to fight tooth and nail to keep their beloved home – or get good compensation for it.

They were just about the last family holding out in their block in a compound about to be levelled to become part of the iconic CCTV towers, also known as the “big trousers” locally. A protracted quarrel with the local authorities and developer did not get the Suns what they wanted in compensation – given how property prices had skyrocketed in Beijing.

They had received notice that they were about to be forcefully thrown out of their flat that morning.

They knew from their neighbours’ experience, that the ‘enemy’ would likely launch a surprise attack early in the morning, grab the residents and then throw their furniture out.

The Suns and a couple of neighbours who had returned to help them put nails and machine oil on the stairs to trip the demolition crew. For their own access to their flat, they hammer-hacked man-size holes on each floor and cut through other now-vacant flats.

Mr Sun Defu, 70, a former state-employed mechanic who had been alloted the flat by his work unit more than 30 years earlier, armed himself for a final showdown.

His weapons of choice: brick shards, an LPG cylinder and a few matches.

The war plan: lob bricks over the roof and then light the LPG cylinder and kick it off the ledge.

Expecting the demolition crew any minute, the frail old man climbed – with his son’s help - onto the flat roof of the apartment block.

He paced the brick-littered roof.

I didn’t dare look down.

We waited for hours.

The demolition crew never came that day.

The Suns eventually got a better compensation and moved to a new flat far from downtown Beijing.

But at least their story did not end in violence.

Read Sim Chi Yin's report on eviction in China in The Sunday Times.

To view photos, click here.

I GUESS it was silly to imagine I was going to meet monsters.

Like all journalists writing about the Khmer Rouge - some veterans for a good two to three decades now - I was in search of the reasons for the bloody insanity that convulsed Cambodia between 1975 and 1979.

On April 17, 34 years ago, the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and unleashed a "pure" Communist revolution that over a short three years, eight months and 20 days claimed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, overwork, disease or starvation.

Decades on, it’s still difficult to fully understand how this horror happened.

For the past month, the regime’s chief jailer Duch has been offering some clues - in the first trial by the United Nations-assisted Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The self-portrait he has sketched could well describe most members of the regime: devout revolutionaries blinded by a complete faith in the Angka ("Organisation").

But that merely excuses the man in the killing machine.

The tribunal seeks to lay down the personal culpability of each of the five senior regime leaders it now has in custody.

Ultimately, it was men (and women) like Duch and his underlings at his notorious S-21 prison who pulled out prisoners’ fingernails, fed them faeces, slit their throats or drained their bodies of blood and left them to die.

ST PHOTO: SIM CHI YIN

Yet, there was a strange disconnect watching Duch, a former maths teacher from Kampong Thom in central Cambodia, sit in his neat, collared shirt in a modern courtroom describing the monstrous medieval forms of torture.

Just as it was when I sought out the reputedly brutal former Khmer Rouge district chief Im Chaem in the movement’s one-time jungle holdout in Cambodia’s remote northwest and was a bit surprised to find a grinning – and not unlikeable – grandmotherly figure.

And when an avuncular, smiling man in a sarong slowly walked up from behind his cows at a village house, the translator had to shake me out of my puzzlement by telling me "That’s him".

It was the former S-21 top guard Him Huy who was described by ex-comrades as a "seasoned killer" who murdered "hundreds" in a book I had read. Over the next almost four hours, he answered every question calmly and in a somewhat practised manner, and admitted killing "five" people. While I had hardly thought I would get the full truth from any of these ex-cadres with lots to hide, he was of a rather more agreeable disposition than I had expected.

I suppose it’s a bit like how we picture murderers as mean and scar-faced.

But in the case of the Khmer Rouge, the disjuncture is perhaps all the more sinister, given the adamant denial of responsibility by former cadres and leaders – despite the long paper trail left by the regime itself and the reams of evidence that have been collected since its fall.

It may well be that atrocities like those committed by the Khmer Rouge will always feel almost beyond human understanding. Like those by the Nazis or in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, perhaps.

This, though, strikes closer to home. The Khmer Rouge terror unfolded in our own backyard, where men wear sarongs in their homes built on stilts and place names start with "kampong".

For Cambodians, the hope is that the tribunal and its trials over the next couple of years will finally help the regime’s victims and the younger post-Khmer Rouge generation of Cambodians come to grips with the whys and hows of the tragedy that has haunted their country for the past 30 years.

ST PHOTO: SIM CHI YIN

Many observers say the long-awaited tribunal – which has been repeatedly tripped up by allegations of corruption and political
interference – needs to quickly deliver justice and even bring more former leaders to book. The country will only then at long last be able to move on, they say.

Others look at mushrooming of office blocks in Phnom Penh and the hardwon, steady 9.5 per cent average GDP growth Cambodia has chalked up over the past decade, and give their diagnosis: the country needs no more healing.

All that makes me think of China, where I’ve lived for almost two years. Even as Cambodia goes through the uncomfortable process of confronting its dark past, this country has not been able to talk about - or indeed allow much research into – its own deadly Cold War era political experiments, the Great Leap Forward (which claimed some 20 to 34 million lives) and the Cultural Revolution (which killed hundreds of thousands more) .

Old wounds and skeletons in the closet may not seem much of an impediment to the present, if China’s (up till recently) double-digit economic growth were the only indicator.

Over time, victims and memories do die out. But the ghosts of the past may still - eventually - need to be put to rest.

Read Chi Yin's full story and view more photos in today's Saturday Special Report here.

TINY Singapore does not often make the news in mega mainland China.
But last night, it did!

A minutes-long segment made it onto China’s main news bulletin on CCTV at 7pm.

No, it wasn’t about an important policy or some celebrity. It was the good ol’ Merlion that got Singapore its few quirky minutes of fame.

CCTV carried a report of the Merlion statue at One Fullerton being struck and damaged by lightning on Saturday afternoon. It showed footage of its charred mane and a hole now lodged at the statue’s base.

The official Xinhua news agency also carried reports on this on its English and Chinese services.

While China’s officials speak of learning from the Singapore experience – or the “Singapore Dream” as a Chinese news magazine put it recently – the city state doesn’t make the news here all that often.

That said, Singapore did became a bit of a talking point here was in late 2007 when Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew remarked, hypothetically, that Singapore “would be happy to rejoin” resource-rich Malaysia – “if they would just educate the Chinese and Indians, use them and treat them as their citizens, they can equal us and even do better than us and we would be happy to rejoin them.”

That made it onto the main pages of major Chinese news websites.

For weeks and months after that, mainland Chinese white collar workers and taxi drivers alike asked Singaporeans living here if it was true that Singapore was “going to rejoin Malaysia”.

And for a while, that was only second to other favourite remarks mainlanders make to Singaporeans: “Oh your country is so clean” and “Prisoners are caned in your country, right?”

The Merlion may not be about heavy matters of the state.

But in many a photo album in homes here, there would be pictures of the half-fish, half-lion creature that is taken as Singapore’s icon – snapped on the ubiquitous Xin-Ma-Tai (Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand) tours that are now popular with the increasingly-middle class mainlanders.

And that, is perhaps why we made the news last night:
http://v.cctv.com/html/media/xinwenlianbo/2009/03/xinwenlianbo_300_20090301_15.shtml

In Beijing

ARE they for real or just putting on a show?

Those questions are being asked of a group of Chinese lawyers who have become the public face of China’s fight to bring home two Qing dynasty bronze sculptures auctioned off for a record sum in Paris last week.

When the rat and rabbit head bronzes were being put up for auction, the lawyers wrote letters of protest and demanded that they be removed from the sale. At the eleventh hour, they applied – but failed to get – a French court injunction to stop the event.

Just before last Wednesday’s auction, one of them flew to Paris to try to do what he could.

And now, days after the pair of rat and rabbit fountainheads looted from Beijing’s old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) almost 150 years ago were bought by mysterious phone bidders for 15.7 million euros apiece, the lawyers are still in hot pursuit.

"We’re hunting for the buyers. We’ll negotiate with him, persuade him to return the relics to China. If that’s not possible, we’ll have to consider legal means," Beijing lawyer Li Xingfeng, told The Straits Times.

He is one of about 90 legal hounds from around the country who have joined the pack – the first time such a group has gathered to chase after China’s cultural relics.

To be sure, they are riding on a wave of patrioitism, and a – contrived or real – sense of lingering injustice from the "century of humiliation" that China suffered at the hands of Western imperialists, a chapter in modern Chinese history vividly symbolised in textbooks here by the sacking of Yuanmingyuan.

Netizens shout their approval from the Web, asking the government to punish auction house Christie’s for defying China’s protests. There seems to be a sense, among Netizens and regular Beijingers one chats with, that as China’s economic and military prowess rises, it wants to speak more loudly on the world stage – and be heard.

As one poster on the popular Sina.com news website wrote: "Our country is strong now, we must be tougher on countries that are gangsters and robbers."

The government too is on side, issuing repeated warnings for Christies to not auction off the bronzes and then, eventually, slapping controls on the London-based auction house immediately after the sale was made.

But does China have a legal claim to the two bronzes?

Local and foreign experts say "no", noting that the three international conventions protecting looted cultural relics – the earliest of which dates to 1954 – cannot be invoked or applied retroactively.

And the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) said as much in a statement on the auction of the Yuanmingyuan sculptures.

But it added that it does "encourage the return of cultural property to its countries of origin" through a 22-country Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to its Countries of Origin or its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation, which can step in to help if negotiations between the two countries involved fail.

Unesco also said it had not received a request for help from China on the two fountainheads as yet.

Professor Wang Yunxia, an expert in cultural relics law at Beijing's Renmin University, said: "I feel there is insufficient legal basis in this case. If the group of lawyers raises a legal case again even now that the sculptures have been sold, it’s a waste of time and society’s resources."

But leader of the lawyers’ group Liu Yang, a Beijing lawyer specialising in commerical law, dismissed accusations in the local media that he and his team were just "putting up a show".

He said last week before flying to Paris to witness the auction: "To us, this is not a difficult case. It’s like just another commerical case. It’s just that it’s about a cultural relic. That’s all."

Ultimately, though, it seems the self-appointed legal guardians of the rat and rabbit fountainheads may be out more to make a point than to win a case.

Retired Qing historian Wang Daocheng, a respected authority on the imperial gardens and palaces, said that besides leaning on diplomacy, the legal avenue is one that China now has to experiment with in its bid to recover its 10 million or so antiquities "lost" overseas.

He noted that the rat and rabbit heads were sold for a record price of 15.7 million euros each – well above the earlier estimates of 8 to 10 million euros apiece. More importantly, the sum is much higher than the HK$7million (S$1.4million) to US$8.84 million (S$13.5 million) apiece that state-backed company Poly Group and Macau gambling king Stanley Ho paid to recover five of the set of 12 animal heads earlier. (The remaining five heads have not been found.)

Prof Wang said: "They are clearly trying to exploit Chinese people’s patriotism and to extort our money. It’s clear that our previous strategy of buying back our relics cannot work anymore.

"We must continue to pursue our relics through legal action.

"Even if it doesn’t work, it will remind the French of what their ancestors did to us."

Anhui province

AS SOON as we turned off the main road, Deng Xiaoping beamed down at us from a giant billboard.

We were still about six smoothly-paved kilometres away from Xiaogang, but there was no mistaking Beijing's stamp of approval for the village taken as the birthplace of China's phenomenal economic transformation.

With China marking 30 years of reforms that have seen it morph from a hobbling has-been power held back by the Maoist-era command system into the world's fourth-largest economy today, the once-impoverished Xiaogang village has been very much in the spotlight.

This is where 18 desperate, starving peasants huddled together to press their thumbprints on an illegal, secret pact doing away with collective farming one cold night in December 1978.

Riding the winds of change, Xiaogang's rebels were not arrested but praised by then-leader of Anhui province Wan Li, who took a battering from other officials. But Mr Wan later won the ear of paramount leader Deng - and the rest, as they say, is history.

The rural revolution which raised grain production instantly then sparked gradual, incremental policy changes that put China on the road to a market economy - or 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' as Beijing still insists on calling it.

That story of how the farmers changed the course of China's history is told, panel by panel, in a museum in the middle of Xiaogang, which with its well-trimmed trees and picture-perfect landscaping is a bit of an abberation in the typically-scruffy Chinese countryside.

Daily bus-loads of visitors, guided by Chinese, English or Japanese-speaking docents, witness how local farmers' annual incomes have shot up an incredible 300 times in the past 30 years - from 22 yuan in 1978 to 6,600 yuan today.

'I never thought I'd see this day. When we decided we couldn't go on farming collectively anymore, we were just trying to feed our wives and children,' said Xiaogang farmer Yan Junchang, leader of the 'production team' at the time of the 1978 rebellion, chomping his way through a six-dish lunch before excusing himself for an afternoon mahjong session.

Doubtless, Xiaogang's early audacity has won it fame and favour. Its residents earned 40 per cent more than the average last year in Anhui, one of China's poorer, landlocked provinces.

Outsiders have come to the village bearing ideas and investment. A grape farming business has been running for some years, with 10 or so local households leasing their land to a commercial company.

In another corner of the village, big tents covered with grey blankets are blooming with mushrooms – another source of income for several of Xiaogang's farmers.

Yet, given its track record as a first-mover, Xiaogang's progress has not been all that impressive.

Other 'brand-name' villages, like Nanjie in Henan province, have already paved their path out of poverty for good: By turning farmers into factory workers, or owners.

Nanjie, which purports to combine the best of Mao Zedong's and Deng's philosophies, already looked a bit like Singapore's Jurong Industrial Park with HDB blocks thrown in when this reporter visited nine years ago in 1999.

That Xiaogang has not made that kind of stunning transformation must often come up in conversation around here. Local propaganda officials have a stock answer. One asked me: 'How can all of China's villages turn to industry and become filled with factories? Who will feed China then?'

Therein lies Beijing's tricky task now.

After the astronomical economic growth charted by turbo-charged cities on the coast since the 1990s, China is finally turning back to the countryside, where its modern day revolution began.

Beijing knows that if a big boost in domestic demand is going to power the Chinese economy to its next wave of growth - especially as export demand slides in the current global downturn - it is in the countryside that the answer lies.

And with an ever-widening rural-urban income gap triggering tens of thousands protests in the countryside every year these days, China know it has to help its rural residents - still 56 per cent of its population - earn more and live more comfortably.

On the other hand, with its paltry - and shrinking - per capita land resources, it needs to ensure the country can grow enough grain and crops to feed itself.

The Chinese leadership is now trying to navigate its way out of this conundrum.

Meanwhile, outside Xiaogang's museum, another giant billboard stands.

Holding taunt against the nippy winter wind, a freshly-mounted picture depicts a smiling President Hu Jintao among Xiaogang's villagers.

In late September, he made a widely-publicised visit to Xiaogang to deliver good news for China's 750 million farmers. He promised that their land leases, currently for 30 years, will be extended and that they will be encouraged to 'transfer' their plots to other farmers or companies so that they can earn a wage - or even pack off to the cities for higher-paying work if they so choose.

That, some observers argue, is what's needed to truly unlock the economic potential of China's farmers.

But first things first, says Remin University sociologist Kang Xiaoguang.

The long-running, institutionalised discrimination that prevents rural migrants from getting full access to housing, education and healthcare when they take on jobs in the cities and towns must first be removed.

'Before we can even talk about radical rural land reform, the biggest change needed is to open up the cities' doors to allow more rural people to really move there,' he said.

'They shouldn't be regarded as mere 'surplus labour' but must become migrants in the full sense of the word.'

And when they indeed do, academics argue, China will finally truly enter its next phase of modernisation.

Read Sim Chi Yin's full story in today's Straits Times Saturday Special Report.