[Marxism] Victimized Chinese farmers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bulldozed by Growth, Stonewalled by Government
Pleas by Peasant Farmers for Fair Payment for Land Are Left Unanswered

By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 26, 2006; A12

AOSHI, China -- On a recent day in this southern Chinese village, an
elderly peasant wearing a conical straw hat hoed fitfully at the dirt in a
vacant lot. Only 90 feet to the east, but a world away, the winners in
China's new economy pulled into a shiny new Honda dealership.

Not long ago, the two-acre lot where the cars are sold -- under a proud red
tower with "Honda" emblazoned on it -- was lush with rice paddies, truck
farms and peanut plots. But times have changed. The fields of Aoshi and
surrounding hamlets have been swallowed up by economic development
unfurling at breakneck speed across the plains and hills here in Guangdong
province, about 175 miles northwest of Hong Kong.

Like the stooped peasant working the soil, many farmers here have been
reduced to tilling vacant strips along the borders of new buildings and
construction sites, raising crops on ground that is no longer legally
theirs to work. Their land, on the edge of fast-growing Yunfu city, has
been marked for development, and they have been marked for obsolescence.

"We can't afford to buy those cars," a farmer said, looking at the Honda
dealership as if it were in a foreign country. "The only ones buying them
are government officials."

Across China, millions of farmers in thousands of villages have met similar
fates, pushed aside by the need for land to build factories, apartments,
hospitals and roads in a country enjoying more than 9 percent annual
growth. The boom has led to a better life for most of the 1.3 billion
Chinese, often including farmers. But it has come at the price of tearing
peasants from their roots and their livelihood, leaving them no option but
to become migrant workers in factories far from home.

"We don't have our land anymore, so where do we go?" said a young farmer
whose family plot in Aoshi was bulldozed to make way for a fire station.

Without an independent court system and unschooled in the ways of
bureaucracy, the farmers fend for themselves against frequently corrupt
local Communist Party officials with broad authority and powerful economic
incentive to confiscate farmland to sell to developers. In recent years,
the result increasingly has been rage and violent protest. Stability in the
countryside has become a major worry for President Hu Jintao's government,
leading Hu to launch an intense campaign for improving life in the countryside.

In Aoshi and the adjacent villages of Xiangyang, Baimianshi and
Shangxiangwei, the price of progress was made clear when officials from
Yunfu city showed up one day a year and a half ago and told farmers to
quickly harvest as many fruits and vegetables as they could. Heavy
equipment arrived 90 minutes later and was in use until nightfall,
villagers recalled, destroying rice paddies, truck gardens and peanut plots
that had provided them with a livelihood for generations untold.
Protests Put Down

The farmers in Aoshi, on Yunfu's northern edge, protested noisily when the
bulldozers came. Hundreds of policemen quickly put down the demonstration.
Ten farmers said they were arrested -- a pattern that would be repeated
during protests over the next year.

The bulldozers and front-end loaders kept at it for 10 days, until about 36
acres had been scraped bare for construction. Although not a large amount
of land by U.S. standards, farmers supporting 144 families, comprising most
of the four villages' 800 residents, had been put out of work, their
leaders said.

Within two weeks, the farmers had organized and gone to Yunfu's Land and
Resources Administration to complain. Yunfu's compensation offer, a
one-time payment averaging $875 per landholding villager, was inadequate,
they said. Instead, they insisted on a lifetime pension of $44 a month per
villager. Officials repeatedly told them everything had been carried out
according to law.

They also turned to the courts. But a court official told them nothing
could be done. "Yunfu is just too corrupt," the official told them. They
went to see provincial authorities in Guangzhou, who also rejected their pleas.

Undaunted, the farmers traveled to Beijing on Nov. 19, 2004, two months
after the bulldozers showed up. They visited the Land and Resources
Ministry, the petition office of Premier Wen Jiabao's government
headquarters and China Central Television, where, they said, no one was
interested in a DVD showing the destruction of their fields.

Instead of attention, they said, they received repeated visits from city
and provincial officials urging them to stay home and avoid making more
trouble. Three months passed, and they were no closer to recovering their
land or getting what they considered acceptable compensation.4out of their
villages at 1 a.m., six of the farmers traveled to the capital on March 15,
2005. Despite their stealth, they recalled, Yunfu police and civilian
officials tracked them down and ordered them to drop their petitions or
face problems at home.

The farmers instead split into three pairs to shake the tail. The tactic
worked. One team eluded the police and presented another petition to Wen's
office. There was no response, and on the train back to Guangzhou, they
noticed a policeman still shadowing them.

By May, work had begun on the Honda dealership and, down the road, on the
regional fire station. With no compensation settlement in sight, villagers
grew desperate as months went by. Again sneaking out one by one after
midnight Nov. 1, six farmers returned to Beijing, hoping to present their
petition anew in Wen's office.

"That's the only place we knew to go," one said.

Hopes Dashed

This time, their hopes rose. An official in the petition office of the
State Council, or cabinet, gave them a letter in a sealed envelope. Do not
open it, they recalled him saying, but give it to the Guangdong provincial
petition office and await a response. On Nov. 17, they got an appointment
to present the letter. The Guangdong petition official, they recalled, read
the letter from Beijing and then handed them another letter, also sealed,
and asked them to hand it over unopened to the Yunfu petition office.

At last, things seemed to be working. So by Nov. 21, when they got in to
see a Yunfu petition official and give him the provincial letter, their
spirits were high. The official reminded them that the petition office was
only a mediator, they recalled, but he promised to turn the letter over to
the appropriate authorities and get them an answer.

Nearly three months went by, the farmers said, before village leaders were
finally called into a meeting on Feb. 16 with two North Yunfu District
officials. "They once again said the land confiscation was legal," a
participant said.

The distraught farmers pulled out a newspaper in which the Guangdong
provincial party secretary, Zhang Dejiang, was quoted as saying that no
land confiscation could be carried out until farmers and authorities agreed
on the compensation. "Yes, we've seen that," one of the officials responded
laconically, according to farmers in the meeting. "But you have to
understand us. Our city is very poor. We can't give you everything you want."

Ye Rui, who heads the Yunfu Land and Resources Administration, said the
city followed government rules, calculating compensation according to the
value of crops in recent years. Asked for a more detailed accounting, he
said in a telephone conversation that he first needed authorization from
Guangdong provincial authorities. Provincial authorities, asked for the
authorization, forwarded a fax nine days later affirming that the rules had
been followed and adding no details.

An entrepreneur involved in the Honda dealership's land-use purchase said
that the owner paid $250,000 for a little more than two acres. That
amounted to many times the compensation offered to the peasants who worked
the land, the farmers said, and they expressed interest in knowing who
pocketed the difference.

Similar transactions have made land confiscations a source of revenue for
cities across China, according to government officials, and a pool of ready
funds for corrupt cadres to skim from. Zhou Tianyong, a professor at the
Central Party School, estimated last year that resale of farmland for
development has brought in $600 billion nationwide since 2003, and only 10
percent of that was paid to farmers in compensation.

In a recent speech, Wen condemned such profit-taking, joining President Hu
in urging better treatment for China's 750 million farmers. The Yunfu party
secretary, Zheng Liping, echoed the party's new theme recently, calling on
the local government to "sincerely welcome petitions and sincerely resolve
problems" raised by farmers, according to the South China Morning Post.

But in Aoshi and surrounding villages, the welcome was tense. Yunfu
peppered the area with police after a Washington Post correspondent visited
recently. Because of the heavy police presence, farmers were reluctant to
leave their homes. Most of those interviewed asked that their names not be
used for fear of retribution.

When the Post correspondent returned a couple of weeks later, he was
swiftly surrounded by four unmarked vehicles and taken by plainclothes
police to North Yunfu District headquarters. There he was interrogated and
lectured on the need for authorization from provincial authorities for any
reporting in Yunfu, before being escorted to the city limits and sent on
his way.


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