Chinese contracts are as good as toilet paper.

no. contracts are shiny and non absorbent. not good for wiping your butt with

@Trumpster

What you and @Napoleon failed to understand, whereas @JanJal partially did, and @Geezer more so albeit sugarcoated a Disney version of history, was the the question of when. Persistently asking "where" our dispute land was the wrong question.

The "founding father" I was referring to predated the one aforementioned in your soliloquy... as was the status quo institution of law governing soil sovereignty, before the Imperial Japanese Army came knocking.

To your point of impermanence in ownership... civil wars or foreign invasion/occupation may likewise shatter America's "illusion" of true land ownership in a blink of an eye...

say, cannabis infused Californians hypothetically overthrew Trump 'Merica in a treasonous coup d'état, seizing all Trump Tower land deeds. The former First Family can try and sue the new, interim Cali regime to no avail. Vice versa in a parallel, alternate universe where the Confederates defeated the Union of the North.

Perhaps the Native American Indians, whom the early western colonists drove into near extinction got it right - the land was not something to be divided up, sold or owned by any one person... as @aienew alluded to.

@bilingual

Please reread my post, I have no idea as to how your post relates to mine. I did not ask "where" and the "when" was the point of my Alabamian law.

BTW, when did you purchase your land? I'm sure the answer will shed some light on the debate.

@Trumpster

Before CPC rule, as insinuated ad nauseam and ad infinitum... apparently you didn't go back far enough.

For fear of China's deep learning algorithms running on Quantum architecture in five years - retroactively biting me in the arse, I'll refrain from disclosing specifics.

You bought the land BEFORE the CCP came to power and that you were able to retain ownership until the 90S or whenever the land grab took place?? Sounds very far fetched, so much so that I had my wife messaged a Beijing classmate of hers and they said they have never heard of such a thing.

And your answer sounds like a cop out which is not endearing to your credibility.

Fact checked and debunked in 8 minutes? Your wife's Beijing classmate must be god. I too find that very far fetched.

I'm pretty sure that Bilinguaexpat's case is of some land that his or her ancestors owned before the revolution, and somehow he/she feels betrayed by the whole civil war thing. Notably his OP was about "we owned", never

"I owned".

But since we are not getting a clear answer from this person, we can just speculate.

Our best lead so far, is "owned a small piece of land near Tienanmen Square worth at least 5 mil many years ago".

We have gone quite a way trying to guess where exactly that land could (or could not) be located - but we could also try to start from that "5 mil" figure and derive possibilities for the "where" and "when" from that.

It doesn't take long to send a Wechat message now-a-days. Nor did I say she is authoritative, just that I went the extra step of asking my wife to ask her classmate if they have heard of such a thing to accentuate how unbelievable that claim was.

Doing simple math, if you purchase the land in 1950 as a 20 year old, that would make you 87 years old today.

Pretty sharp for an old man.

@JanJal, that was my hunch as well. So then ownership becomes even murky. My grandfather's truck got stolen once, can I say a truck that we owned was stolen?

Using billingualexpat's argument, can I say I own half of the South if one of my ancestors were one of the 8 noblemen granted the Charter to the Province of Carolina.