As illegal land grabs increase, so does unrest in China

by Dan Martin | AFP | via (uncensored) yahoo!news
July 24, 2007

In China, where business chiefs and officials rarely wait for someone to put up a "for sale" sign before taking over the land, property disputes are one of the biggest sources of social unrest.

The issue has leapt to the top of the national agenda in recent years amid a wave of violent land disputes often triggered by rapacious developers and corrupt local government workers snatching land from hapless farmers and city dwellers.

"This is the foremost issue in rural areas and probably the most contentious issue leading to social unrest in China today," Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based China researcher with Human Rights Watch, told AFP.

There were 130,000 cases of illegal land grabs last year, an increase of 17.3 percent from 2005, the land ministry said in March.

But Bequelin said those figures likely represented the tip of the iceberg, with many more going unreported by officials.

He noted past official estimates that 50-60 percent of all land deals in China were illegal, rising to 90 percent in many places.

The issue poses perhaps the greatest risk to social stability in China as angry villagers and farming communities erupt in anger, experts say.

"The crux of the issue is that governments at all levels plunder the land resources, the commoners see little if any of the money and violators get off scot-free," said Hou Guoyan, a retired professor from the China University of Political Science and Law.

In his annual parliamentary address in March, Premier Wen Jiabao specifically warned officials against illegal land grabs.

Beijing has also issued a series of regulations aimed at increasing scrutiny, but experts say the central government does not have enough power to enforce the law in the provinces.

"The (central) government is at a loss to solve the problem," Hou said.

Liu Xiaoying, a rural issues researcher at the China Academy of Social Sciences, said one of the main problems was that the standard compensation to villagers for losing their land was too low.

"The central government wants to raise the compensation levels but local governments oppose this because it will hit their profit margins on land deals," Liu said. "This is very difficult to solve."

One of the most famous land rights cases in recent times was that of a plucky homeowner in southwestern China's Chongqing city who stood firm in a compensation dispute.

Wu Ping gained overnight fame in March, due in part to photographs that were widely circulated on the Internet and later in official media, of her modest two-storey brick dwelling sitting defiantly in the middle of an excavated construction pit.

"If you are right, you must stand up for yourself, otherwise people will bully you," said the charismatic 49-year-old, who was hailed by many as a heroine.

Under the media glare, Wu's compensation demands were met, but she is the exception.

For many, stronger resistance is the only option after being pushed off their land and finding local authorities unsympathetic.

According to the latest figures from the Ministry of Public Security, there were 87,000 protests across the country in 2005, up 50 percent from two years earlier, many of them to do with land grabs.

>> Read the complete article