The battle may be over, but the memory of the nail house incident in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality is likely to linger on.

Forty-nine-year-old Wu Ping and her 51-year-old husband Yang Wu only wanted to get what they thought was adequate compensation for the small building where for years they had lived and run a restaurant. The site had been targeted for demolition to make way for a shopping center.

But it was the sight of their two-storey house perched atop a tall, thimble-shaped spur of land that stirred up a media frenzy during the past fortnight. The couple's home was soon dubbed the "nail house" in reference to the Chinese way of describing the stubborn couple who just did not want to move.

After an exhausting three-year quarrel between the developer and the homeowners, the parties reached a peaceful settlement on compensation terms on Monday.

While the agreement may have pleased the two sides, it did little to quiet the netizens who had been pouring fuel onto the fiery land dispute in cyberspace.

In fact, netizens were the first to seize on reports of the standoff. Soon pictures of the lonely house were everywhere on the Internet, and the couple's debut on television was not far behind.

Hundreds of homeowners eventually gathered outside the nail house to show their support for the feisty pair.

The popular outrage pulsing at the heart of the episode seemed to hint at an awakening of the public's awareness of their private property rights in a country where people have long been taught that public property comes before private gain.

So long as people feel hard done by in such cases, more nail houses are likely to dot the horizon of the country's sweeping relocation campaign, said a public administration professor surnamed Xu at Peking University.

For experts, the standoff exposed looming loopholes in the country's civil and commercial law system.

The Property Rights Law, which was passed at the annual session of National People's Congress last month and will take effect in October, emphasizes for the first time in the country's history that private, collective and public property are equally important and enjoy the same level of protection.

Yang Wu, the aggrieved husband in the nail house case, seemed to be breaking new ground by planting the property rights flag so firmly during the battle. However, one thing he might not have considered was that the Property Rights Law also stipulates that the private property rights are not inalienable and do not supersede public interest.

Then again, the question of what exactly is meant by the public interest, which the law does not define, has yet to be answered.

In fact, legal experts are still debating the issue.

The area in Chongqing where the nail house once stood was an old residential area whose time had come. That is why the district government stressed the public interest aspect of the relocation project.

But as some legal experts have noted, real estate developers are occasionally the beneficiaries in cases like this, so exactly how the public benefits is unclear.

In a study recently published by Renmin University of China, professors argued that legal procedures like the one in question should leave no room for ambiguity.

They said that homeowners should be allowed to vote collectively on whether to give up their land to developers.

Legal experts have also questioned the legality of property developers be allowed to demolish people's houses.

"The agent of land acquisition should be the government. Property developers are not valid agents to commence demolition," said Wang Weiguo, a legal scholar at the Chinese University of Politics and Law.

Wang said the government should initiate a demolition project only after proper urban planning, securing an evaluation from the local people's congress and holding a public hearing.

Government officials should also negotiate with home-owners, Wang added.

But in most cases of urban relocation in China, real estate developers are usually the ones who, with permission from the government, enforce demolition actions.

Experts also criticized the practice of cutting off power and water supplies to force stubborn homeowners to move. They said such moves were "inhumane."

"There are too many loopholes in the current urban demolition regulations. They need urgent modification," Wang said.

While public expectations of how the Property Rights Law will change life in China, experts said disputes between the government and the grassroots will continue so long as some administrative and even judiciary officials fail to adhere to the law.

(China Daily April 6, 2007)