[Pen-l] The land issue in China

[Marvin Gandall <marvgandall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Most social unrest in China is coming from peasant farmers who want to own
the land they lease from the state, not least in order to be able to borrow
against it and to profit from its sale - profits which currently go to the
state and corrupt local officials. But opponents of privatization argue that
breaking up the leasehold system will accelerate the dispossesion of farmers
from the land and deprive migrant workers of a home to return when
unemployed, producing an army of landless rural poor living in vast urban
slums as in India and Brazil.
====================================
Losing the countryside: a restive peasantry calls on Beijing for land rights
By Jamil Anderlini
Financial Times
February 19 2008

Every successful peasant rebellion in China’s history has been inspired by
calls for more equitable distribution of land. That is why the current
government, heir to the last peasant revolt in 1949, is so worried about a
fledgling land reform movement that its organisers say is set to spread
across the country, challenging the foundation of communism.

China’s normally efficient state security apparatus was caught off-guard in
December when separate groups of peasant farmers in four remote parts of the
country published very similar statements on the internet claiming to have
seized their collectively owned land from the state and unilaterally
privatised it. Security agents in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jiangsu and
Shaanxi and the port city of Tianjin quickly rounded up most of the handful
of peasants who signed the documents. Some have since been released after
signing confessions while others remain in custody or have disappeared,
their fate unknown.

The peasants’ statements accused local officials of profiting personally by
requisitioning land from farmers without providing adequate compensation and
using it for corrupt development projects. The country’s Communist
constitution stipulates that all rural land is owned by the state, which
leases it to individuals to use on a 30-year contract basis but can take it
back with relative impunity.

China’s economic boom has been partly driven by a ready supply of this cheap
land, which officials sell to manufacturers or property developers after
paying cursory compensation and removing any peasant farmers who occupy it.
The opaque process is rife with opportunities for corruption and official
land seizures have become the main cause of protests in China.

In each of the four provinces, the “seizure” of land was in name only and
carries no legal weight. Before their arrest, the peasants in Heilongjiang
province managed to survey and divide up a block that had been confiscated
by local officials. But the documents they signed violate the Chinese
constitution and at least three laws stipulating that all land in China is
owned by the state. In the other locations the peasants did not even get
this far – the swift action of the security apparatus forestalled any
physical seizures.

Even without much action on the ground, the protest represents a new and
serious challenge to the party. China’s security system deals with close to
100,000 “public order disturbances” every year (according to government
statistics, which Chinese political activists believe downplay the true
scale of social unrest). But the vast majority of them are localised and
unco-ordinated and the protagonists usually emphasise their loyalty to the
system while appealing to Beijing to address the misdeeds of local
officials.

This incident was different. Not only were the protesters challenging the
party directly, they were also organised at a national level by a
sophisticated group of dissidents. The action was co-ordinated by a loose
association of journalists, academics, intellectuals and political activists
and its calls for privatisation of all rural land were a clear rejection of
the current regime. In words that could have come from the mouth of Mao
Zedong, one declaration asked: “Whose country is this? Who really benefits
in the name of public interest? . . . Only when you protect the rights of
the masses and help the masses to develop can you be called the government.”

The authors of the declarations are mostly based in Beijing and have so far
evaded capture. They operate in secrecy and have re­quested that no details
be re­vealed of their identities in order to avoid immediate arrest. Some
are career dissidents while others are solid members of the party
establishment; for their safety the Financial Times has decided not to
reveal any more about who they are. They say they are acting out of a
conviction that many of the problems faced by China’s peasants stem from the
current land ownership system.

These organisers, comprised of a core group of about 10 people, spent more
than two years travelling the country gathering thousands of signatures of
peasants involved in land disputes and convincing them that seizing land was
the best way to draw attention to their grievances.

They say the co-ordinated release of the four declarations is just the
beginning of a movement that is set to spread across the country. According
to a person who claims to have drafted the original statements (which were
all quickly removed from the internet by government censors), thousands more
peasant farmers in dozens of other locations in 20 provinces have already
signed similar declarations and are preparing to seize land. If this happens
the government will be faced with a real grassroots rebellion that could
threaten its tight grip on power just as the world’s attention is focused on
the Beijing Olympics.

These activists have some powerful supporters, including prominent
developers who have called publicly for privatisation of rural land – a move
they argue would help cool soaring property prices in the cities by vastly
expanding the land supply while granting rural citizens the same security
urban dwellers now enjoy.

In the 1990s the government began experimenting with private home ownership
in the largest cities by transferring state housing to employees of
state-owned enterprises. While all urban land technically remains state
owned, the leases are much longer than in the countryside (up to 70 years)
and land-use rights are bought and sold as if the land belonged to the
lessee. This de facto privatisation has led to an explosion in personal
wealth and was instrumental in the creation of an urban middle class. In the
late 1990s, state-owned banks started issuing the first home mortgages since
the revolution and today mortgage lending for urban homes makes up a large
proportion of the banking system.

Peasant farmers are allowed to own their homes but not their land, so they
are unable to use it as collateral for loans. Advocates of reform say this
exacerbates the looming wealth gap between cities and the countryside, where
land is virtually worthless.

Land privatisation appeals to the peasants themselves for obvious reasons
but it also has high-level support from some reform-minded sections of the
Communist party, including senior retired officials as well as some of the
country’s more liberal establishment academics.

Zhang Guangyou, 73, is a well-known author and former journalist who worked
for state broadcaster Xinhua and was chief editor of the state-owned
Peasants’ Daily newspaper. He argues passionately that the time has come for
the party to give the land back to the people. “The 30-year contract system
is fatally flawed and cannot last much longer – the peasants should decide
how to use their land and be allowed to privatise it if that’s what they
want,” Mr Zhang says.

Some government scholars say a shortage of arable land in China would be
exacerbated if peasants were allowed to sell at will to developers. But
activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing and argue that
privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more
efficient farms.

The power to reclassify rural land as industrial or urban lies with
government officials, who derive much of their official revenues (not to
mention illicit personal income) from selling reclassified land. While
peasants do not have to pay for their 30-year leases, they are allowed to
sublet their land, which provides huge scope for officials to grant
government land for free to their friends and relatives, who then lease the
land for a profit.

Advocates of privatisation acknowledge that the majority of local officials
across the country are unlikely to support the loss of such a large source
of revenue and this entrenched interest is probably the biggest obstacle to
the government agreeing to such a reform. “The big problem with our
socialist system is that Communist party officials have become the
landlords,” says one organiser of the protests, who argues that private land
ownership will be a precursor to a more pluralistic political system.

He says privatisation in urban areas has given the middle class a bigger say
in the way the country is run and points to a recent wave of peaceful
demonstrations in cities such as Xiamen and Shanghai, in which citizens took
to the streets over specific issues that directly affected their property
prices – a proposed chemical plant in a densely populated part of Xiamen and
a proposed extension of Shanghai’s magnetic levitation train through the
city centre – and in each case managed to convince the government to revise
its plans. “If the people were given land they would have the power to speak
out and it would help bring democracy to China,” says the activist.

On the other side of the debate, there are some convincing critics of the
land reform movement who worry that China could go down the same path as
other post-Communist countries, most notably Russia, were it hastily to
privatise all rural land.

“It is an impossible miracle that China, with its floating population of
200m migrant workers from rural areas, has no real slums and it is because
everyone has a piece of land in their home village they can always go back
to,” says Wen Tiejun, dean of the school of agriculture and rural
development at the elite People’s University in Beijing. “Thanks to the
current system of state ownership China has enjoyed three decades of rapid
economic growth and has virtually no rural landless poor, in contrast with
most large developing countries.”

He points out that a third of India’s population is classified as landless
rural poor, a problem that has helped spark armed insurrection by Maoist
guerrillas in the country’s north, while in Brazil a national landless
farmers’ movement has sprung up. “I advise the Chinese government that if
they want the same problems as India has then they should go ahead and
privatise the land,” he says.

For now, the government agrees with him. The official line is that land
privatisation is “illegal, unconstitutional and impossible” and that anyone
who challenges the status quo will be dealt with firmly by the state’s
ruthless security apparatus.

The activists say the language used in the declarations and the timing of
their release was intended to evoke an event known to most students of
modern Chinese history – the “spontaneous” land reform secretly carried out
by a small group of peasants in December 1978 in the tiny village of
Xiaogang in China’s eastern Anhui Province.

At that time the country was still recovering from the chaos of the cultural
revolution. Most arable land was collectivised into communes, a system that
had helped push much of the country to the brink of starvation. According to
Communist party legend, after consulting the village elders on how they
could avoid starvation, 18 hungry peasant farmers in Xiaogang signed a
secret pact dividing their commune’s land between them for each household to
farm individually, a unilateral action that could easily have led to them
all being executed as traitors.

Instead, their example was championed by senior reform-minded officials,
including paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the “household
responsibility system” be rolled out across the countryside. Peasant
households were given 30-year contracts to use their land to grow what they
wished and to keep or sell any surplus they produced. Capitalism had
returned and the Chinese economic miracle had begun. This year is the 30th
anniversary of the Xiaogang action and, during the next few years, the
original land-lease contracts will start to expire. While the government has
said it will extend them by another 30 years, the calls for reform are
growing louder.

Deng’s presence still looms large over Xiaogang, making it easy to find.
“Just turn right when you see Deng Xiaoping,” the locals advise. Sure
enough, soon after exiting the shiny new interstate toll expressway,
visitors come across a giant fading billboard picture of Deng smiling down
magnanimously underneath characters that read: “Xiaogang, the first village
in China to reform”. But Yan Junchang, the man credited with leading the
Xiaogang action that launched China’s economic reform policy, has long since
lost the rebellious streak that drove him to challenge the party and
communal land system that was the very foundation of Maoist ideology.

“Under the leadership of my Communist party the land is not private but
collectivised under socialism. Our party can’t go back to the old times when
land was all privately owned because that was the reason we liberated the
whole country in the revolution to begin with,” Mr Yan says, when asked
whether he supports his modern-day counterparts.

Mr Zhang bristles when he hears what Mr Yan has to say about land reform
these days. “What I know is that it was the communal land system that killed
more than 30m people in the Great Leap Forward and it is the current system
that is causing so much suffering today and must be changed,” he says.
“After all, China is a revolutionary country, its revolution was a peasant’s
revolution and the main issue for the peasants is land.”

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