By Sophie Song - Beijing’s pledge to carry out land law reforms and expand peasant rights, while well-intentioned, may actually exacerbate and bring to a fever pitch ongoing land disputes across China.
As China rapidly modernized in the last few decades, it has also seen the expropriation and sale of communal land by local governments, which has provoked discontent among peasants who have traditionally relied on land for livelihood. The resulting rural rights movement threatens to undermine the Communist Party’s legitimacy, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
“Right now, the majority of places have land disputes, and more than half of them are the subject of rights campaigns,” said a rights attorney based in the Guangdong province.
For example, in 2011, Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong, saw the village committee physically ejected by angry villagers, after the ruling body entered into contracts with developers. Since then, the village has seen a succession of village committees who endeavored to unwind the original land transactions and retrieve the land to no avail.
It is not surprising, therefore, that land reform was an important component of the reform directive unveiled at the Third Plenum in November. Chinese leaders vowed that farmers would be granted more control over their land, allowing them to mortgage or transfer rights. Following up in December, Beijing also announced that it was considering new laws that would allow peasants to more conveniently challenge local authorities over land disputes.
But enacting reforms may prove very difficult for the government, as obstacles are often complex and differ from one village to the next. To begin with, even ascertaining property ownership will be difficult in rural China, where record keeping is sub-par.
In addition, expanding peasant rights, while necessary, could hamper the ability of local governments to use communal land for infrastructure, industrial projects and housing for economic expansion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Nonetheless, the Third Plenum made a clear pledge to “endow peasants with more property rights.” The more detailed resolution stated that the Party “will narrow the scope of land expropriation, regularize the procedures for land appropriation, and improve the rational, regular and multiple security mechanisms or farmers whose land is requisitioned.”