China to Deter Farmland Seizures

Chinese officials vowed Wednesday to crack down on land seizures that are displacing as many as 1 million farmers a year and increasing public unrest.

The move is part of Beijing’s effort to balance nearly three decades of lopsided economic development that favors urban areas over rural ones by now fostering a “new socialist countryside.”

“In building a new countryside, one of the most important issues is protecting rural resources, especially farmland, and we must implement the strictest farmland protection system,” Yin Chengjie, vice minister of agriculture, told a news briefing during the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress.

That means implementing a strict system for approving land use decisions, Yin said, and preventing local officials from taking advantage of farmers.

Chinese farmers do not own the land they till. It belongs instead to village collectives controlled by the government. The system is open to rampant abuse by local officials who seize land, sell it to developers and keep the proceeds.

One lawmaker told the official China Daily that the average farmer in western China receives only about $2,200 to move off the land and find a new home. Farmers complain that sums like this are not enough, and those displaced without other marketable skills face a grim future after that cash is spent.

“We have to recognize that there is a problem of taking farmers’ land at a very low price,” said Du Ying, vice chairman of the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission. “That shows that the current system is outdated. We must transform this system.”

Beijing has come under more pressure to do something about the long-neglected countryside, where about 800 million people live with stagnant income and few social security programs. By the government’s own count, 87,000 incidents of public unrest erupted across the country last year. At least 65% were triggered by land acquisition disputes, according to the New China News Agency.

During his annual report to the National People’s Congress, which opened Sunday, Premier Wen Jiabao repeated his pledge to moderate China’s relentless development to spread the wealth and revive the Chinese countryside.

Wen hailed the “epochmaking significance” of Beijing’s plan to eliminate the 2,600-year-old agricultural tax throughout the country starting this year and announced that China would spend an extra $5.2 billion on rural schools, hospitals, crop subsidies and other programs.

“Certainly there is some grandstanding to the rhetoric, but it adds up to a very significant package,” said Dali Yang, a China expert at the University of Chicago. “This government is concerned about stability issues and the rural population. [The new initiative] will help ease the tensions but it will not solve the problems certainly.”