China has spent the last 30-odd years building infrastructure at a crazy rate, and nowhere is that more evident than the city of Guangzhou.
During this ongoing process, Chinese authorities had to deal with all kinds of setbacks, including, as it turns out, an extremely stubborn homeowner.
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China is now an economic superpower with flying cars, floating cities (pictured below), and one of the fastest rates of EV adoption in the world, but it wasn’t always like this.
The country dramatically has scaled up efforts to modernize over the last three decades.
China had emerged from the last century with a sizable land mass and the (then) largest population in the world, but a proportionately small economy.
The biggest problem was infrastructure, not labor or resources, so the Chinese government has been throwing money at the problem since.
This means that massive portions of land went from being fields to becoming giant cities in a matter of years.
They’ve got villages that became towns, and towns then became giant metropolitan cities.
That’s what happened with Guangzhou in the south of China.
Guangzhou was never what we’d call a ‘small’ town to begin with, but the city is becoming bigger and the population is growing at a fast rate.
In 1990, it had a population of 5.9 million people; in 2010, the population was 12.7 million and now it’s a hair under 20 million.
Yes, it really is that big.
Authorities keep building roads and buildings and at some point, they decided to build a highway, and highways need bridges.
This is Haizhuyong Bridge, which – in a way – is a place a woman named Ms Liang calls home.
Ms Liang’s home was an ‘obstacle’ in the middle of the road authorities were flattening to build the bridge, but Ms Liang simply refused to leave.
Authorities tried everything they could to make her move.
They offered free apartments and cash compensation, but Ms Liang simply wouldn’t budge.
In the end, the local government gave up and built the bridge literally around her property.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Ms Liang is adamant she really doesn’t mind.
Well, good for her.
We’ve all got to live somewhere, right?
