MCLC: clash over land rights in Shandong

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: clash over land rights in Shandong
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Source: China Real Time blog, WSJ (5/14/14):
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/14/the-deadly-tent-fire-that-chi
na-doesnt-want-people-to-talk-about/

The Deadly Tent Fire That China Doesn’t Want People to Talk About
By Stanley Lubman

A grisly crime arising out of a clash over land rights in eastern China’s
Shandong is the latest illustration of a critical disconnect among
farmers, local village authorities and the central government, which has
pledged land reforms that have not yet been enacted.

Disputes over illegal land seizures in China have become the country’s
dominant form of social unrest in recent years and constitute one of the
thorniest problems currently facing the country’s leaders.

The Shandong story <http://english.caixin.com/2014-04-08/100662313.html>
erupted one night late in March in a village in Pingdu County,  when five
men set fire to a tent on village land in which four residents were
sleeping, according to an account published by the respected news magazine
Caixin. The fire reportedly killed one and left the other three injured,
two critically.

The tent had been put up by outraged residents protesting village leaders’
sale of 270 hectares of village-owned land to a property developer in 2006
without having lawfully obtained the necessary residents’ consent.  In
response, one of the village leaders and the head of a construction
company reportedly dispatched five arsonists to torch the tent. According
to Caixin, all seven of the men responsible were arrested last month.

In early April, according to China Digital Times, the Central Propaganda
Department issued the following instructions
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/03/minitrue-pingdu-death-taiwan-protests
/> to Chinese media: “The media must immediately cool down coverage of the
Pingdu homicide case. Discontinue follow-up reporting.”

Such directives, of course, don’t resolve a fundamental ongoing conflict.

Local governments continue to seek income from land transfers because
central government funding doesn’t cover their needs. Village residents do
not own the land, and they have only the right to farm it for a term of 30
years. When village leaders sell farmland, very often the farmers, who
lose the use of their plots, are not properly compensated.

Protests over land grabs have multiplied in recent years:  In one recent
survey <http://www.landesa.org/china-survey-6/>by rural-development
institute Landesa, 43% of villagers said that local officials had taken or
tried to take their land, and that on the average government payments to
farmers were less than 3% of the market value of the land. It is no wonder
that conflicts over land constituted more than 20% of the so-called “mass
conflicts” in 2012.

The Pingdu residents claim that the government never notified them of the
sale, the amount of property involved or the compensation that they would
receive, according to Caixin. A former employee of the party committee
told the magazine that village officials had faked villagers’ signatures
so the deal could proceed without their knowledge. The problems in Pingdu,
it said, “could never have occurred if there were checks on the local
government’s power.”

It may be that higher-level government units were complicit in the illegal
land sale, as residents in the Guangdong village of Wukan alleged in
another widely publicized case of illegal land expropriation several years
ago.

The problem is compounded by the fast pace of urbanization. As the value
of rural land increases, developers have become increasingly interested in
purchasing village-owned land—and, as one Wall Street Journal story put it
recently, local governments are “growing ever more addicted” to revenues
from land sales. A report
<http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/04/25/land-sales-the-ever-more-luc
rative-habit-chinas-officials-just-cant-kick/> issued by the Ministry of
Land and Resources states that local government land sales in 2013 raised
4.2 billion yuan ($682 billion), a 56% increase over last year.

The Chinese Communist Party has long been aware of the basic problem
resulting from the limited rights of farmers over the property on which
their livelihood depends.  At a major conclave in November, Party leaders
promised that  “farmers will be given more property rights,” and in
January the Central Committee of the Party and the State Council issued a
document on rural policy that stated that farmers will be allowed “to
transfer or mortgage” land which they farm under contract with their
villages to “farms, rural cooperatives and agricultural enterprises.” The
farmers would remain the legal “owners,” according to official media
reports 
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-12/31/c_133010513.htm>.

Experiments with expanding famers’ rights had already been underway before
the November meeting, as noted in a prior column
<http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/02/07/chinas-rubble-strewn-path-to
-land-reform/>. But the reforms will take time to implement. Land laws
will have to be amended to clarify the rights involved, and the current
system for registration of land rights must be expanded.  The system does
not yet exist country-wide and will not be finished for five years,
according to China’s minister of agriculture
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-12/31/c_133010513.htm>.

In the meantime, village leaders will likely continue to require sources
of income that they can use to increase available revenue for village
needs, while the central government will have to use laws and policies to
restrain illegal land takings in the countryside.  To be effective,
Beijing needs to overcome the often critical disconnect between national
laws and policies and local governments that must enforce them.

Because conditions vary greatly across the country, any reforms can only
be carried out incrementally, often only tentatively. It should be no
surprise that the problems are massive, and that the party-state will have
to shoulder heavy burdens in order to expand the rights of China’s farmers.

Stanley Lubman, a long-time specialist on Chinese law, is a Distinguished
Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, School of
Law. He is the author of “Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao”
(Stanford University Press, 1999) and editor of “The Evolution of Law
Reform in China: An Uncertain Path” (Elgar, 2012).