China's farmers protest a key Mao tenet
Peasants want to own their land and have organized rallies in several provinces. More are planned.
from the January 22, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
When farmers returned home spontaneously they were allocated only half the land they had been obliged to abandon, residents recall. The local authorities retained control over the other 25,000 acres, saying they were holding it in reserve for future returnees.
No more farmers came back, however, and over the past 20 years those 25,000 acres of publicly held land have shrunk to less than 7,000 acres, according to official documents.
"The rest has become the private property of local government officials who rent it out to peasants for their own profit," says one local official in the district seat of Weinan who is sympathetic to the farmers and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of punishment.
Challenging a key Communist tenet
Such land grabs by corrupt officials – who sell the land to developers or rent it out for personal gain – are not uncommon in China: They are the cause of most of the tens of thousands of peasant riots that break out every year across the country.
But the spate of recent declarations asserting farmers' private ownership over the land has taken such protests a crucial step further, challenging a central pillar of the Communist Party's legitimacy.
Mao Zedong attracted millions of peasants to the 1949 revolution with his promise to seize the land from rapacious landlords and give it to them. Today, however, "officials have become the modern landlords," the Sanmenxia region farmers complain in their declaration.
The announcements of land claims in five Chinese provinces, which government censors removed from websites as soon as they found them, appeared because "at a certain moment, the peasants couldn't take it anymore. They have been petitioning the government every year without a solution. It just exploded," according to the Weinan official.
But the timing of the announcements was no coincidence: The movement is being coordinated and encouraged by pro-democracy intellectual activists who see resolution of the peasants' grievances as a step towards political freedom, says one such activist. "We are in touch with peasants in 13 other provinces and they will launch their demands when the time comes," he says. "It will take time to organize."
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