Every successful peasant rebellion in China’s history has been inspired by calls for more equitable distribution of land. That is why the current government, heir to the last peasant revolt in 1949, is so worried about a fledgling land reform movement that its organisers say is set to spread across the country, challenging the foundation of communism.
China’s normally efficient state security apparatus was caught off-guard in December when separate groups of peasant farmers in four remote parts of the country published very similar statements on the internet claiming to have seized their collectively owned land from the state and unilaterally privatised it. Security agents in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jiangsu and Shaanxi and the port city of Tianjin quickly rounded up most of the handful of peasants who signed the documents. Some have since been released after signing confessions while others remain in custody or have disappeared, their fate unknown.
The peasants’ statements accused local officials of profiting personally by requisitioning land from farmers without providing adequate compensation and using it for corrupt development projects. The country’s Communist constitution stipulates that all rural land is owned by the state, which leases it to individuals to use on a 30-year contract basis but can take it back with relative impunity.
China’s economic boom has been partly driven by a ready supply of this cheap land, which officials sell to manufacturers or property developers after paying cursory compensation and removing any peasant farmers who occupy it. The opaque process is rife with opportunities for corruption and official land seizures have become the main cause of protests in China.
In each of the four provinces, the “seizure” of land was in name only and carries no legal weight. Before their arrest, the peasants in Heilongjiang province managed to survey and divide up a block that had been confiscated by local officials. But the documents they signed violate the Chinese constitution and at least three laws stipulating that all land in China is owned by the state. In the other locations the peasants did not even get this far – the swift action of the security apparatus forestalled any physical seizures.
Even without much action on the ground, the protest represents a new and serious challenge to the party. China’s security system deals with close to 100,000 “public order disturbances” every year (according to government statistics, which Chinese political activists believe downplay the true scale of social unrest). But the vast majority of them are localised and unco-ordinated and the protagonists usually emphasise their loyalty to the system while appealing to Beijing to address the misdeeds of local officials.
This incident was different. Not only were the protesters challenging the party directly, they were also organised at a national level by a sophisticated group of dissidents. The action was co-ordinated by a loose association of journalists, academics, intellectuals and political activists and its calls for privatisation of all rural land were a clear rejection of the current regime. In words that could have come from the mouth of Mao Zedong, one declaration asked: “Whose country is this? Who really benefits in the name of public interest? . . . Only when you protect the rights of the masses and help the masses to develop can you be called the government.”
The authors of the declarations are mostly based in Beijing and have so far evaded capture. They operate in secrecy and have requested that no details be revealed of their identities in order to avoid immediate arrest. Some are career dissidents while others are solid members of the party establishment; for their safety the Financial Times has decided not to reveal any more about who they are. They say they are acting out of a conviction that many of the problems faced by China’s peasants stem from the current land ownership system.
These organisers, comprised of a core group of about 10 people, spent more than two years travelling the country gathering thousands of signatures of peasants involved in land disputes and convincing them that seizing land was the best way to draw attention to their grievances.
They say the co-ordinated release of the four declarations is just the beginning of a movement that is set to spread across the country. According to a person who claims to have drafted the original statements (which were all quickly removed from the internet by government censors), thousands more peasant farmers in dozens of other locations in 20 provinces have already signed similar declarations and are preparing to seize land. If this happens the government will be faced with a real grassroots rebellion that could threaten its tight grip on power just as the world’s attention is focused on the Beijing Olympics.
These activists have some powerful supporters, including prominent developers who have called publicly for privatisation of rural land – a move they argue would help cool soaring property prices in the cities by vastly expanding the land supply while granting rural citizens the same security urban dwellers now enjoy.
In the 1990s the government began experimenting with private home ownership in the largest cities by transferring state housing to employees of state-owned enterprises. While all urban land technically remains state owned, the leases are much longer than in the countryside (up to 70 years) and land-use rights are bought and sold as if the land belonged to the lessee. This de facto privatisation has led to an explosion in personal wealth and was instrumental in the creation of an urban middle class. In the late 1990s, state-owned banks started issuing the first home mortgages since the revolution and today mortgage lending for urban homes makes up a large proportion of the banking system.
Peasant farmers are allowed to own their homes but not their land, so they are unable to use it as collateral for loans. Advocates of reform say this exacerbates the looming wealth gap between cities and the countryside, where land is virtually worthless.
Land privatisation appeals to the peasants themselves for obvious reasons but it also has high-level support from some reform-minded sections of the Communist party, including senior retired officials as well as some of the country’s more liberal establishment academics.
Zhang Guangyou, 73, is a well-known author and former journalist who worked for state broadcaster Xinhua and was chief editor of the state-owned Peasants’ Daily newspaper. He argues passionately that the time has come for the party to give the land back to the people. “The 30-year contract system is fatally flawed and cannot last much longer – the peasants should decide how to use their land and be allowed to privatise it if that’s what they want,” Mr Zhang says.
Some government scholars say a shortage of arable land in China would be exacerbated if peasants were allowed to sell at will to developers. But activists point out that vast tracts are already disappearing and argue that privatisation would probably speed up the creation of larger and more efficient farms.
The power to reclassify rural land as industrial or urban lies with government officials, who derive much of their official revenues (not to mention illicit personal income) from selling reclassified land. While peasants do not have to pay for their 30-year leases, they are allowed to sublet their land, which provides huge scope for officials to grant government land for free to their friends and relatives, who then lease the land for a profit.
Advocates of privatisation acknowledge that the majority of local officials across the country are unlikely to support the loss of such a large source of revenue and this entrenched interest is probably the biggest obstacle to the government agreeing to such a reform. “The big problem with our socialist system is that Communist party officials have become the landlords,” says one organiser of the protests, who argues that private land ownership will be a precursor to a more pluralistic political system.
He says privatisation in urban areas has given the middle class a bigger say in the way the country is run and points to a recent wave of peaceful demonstrations in cities such as Xiamen and Shanghai, in which citizens took to the streets over specific issues that directly affected their property prices – a proposed chemical plant in a densely populated part of Xiamen and a proposed extension of Shanghai’s magnetic levitation train through the city centre – and in each case managed to convince the government to revise its plans. “If the people were given land they would have the power to speak out and it would help bring democracy to China,” says the activist.
On the other side of the debate, there are some convincing critics of the land reform movement who worry that China could go down the same path as other post-Communist countries, most notably Russia, were it hastily to privatise all rural land.
“It is an impossible miracle that China, with its floating population of 200m migrant workers from rural areas, has no real slums and it is because everyone has a piece of land in their home village they can always go back to,” says Wen Tiejun, dean of the school of agriculture and rural development at the elite People’s University in Beijing. “Thanks to the current system of state ownership China has enjoyed three decades of rapid economic growth and has virtually no rural landless poor, in contrast with most large developing countries.”
He points out that a third of India’s population is classified as landless rural poor, a problem that has helped spark armed insurrection by Maoist guerrillas in the country’s north, while in Brazil a national landless farmers’ movement has sprung up. “I advise the Chinese government that if they want the same problems as India has then they should go ahead and privatise the land,” he says.
For now, the government agrees with him. The official line is that land privatisation is “illegal, unconstitutional and impossible” and that anyone who challenges the status quo will be dealt with firmly by the state’s ruthless security apparatus.
The activists say the language used in the declarations and the timing of their release was intended to evoke an event known to most students of modern Chinese history – the “spontaneous” land reform secretly carried out by a small group of peasants in December 1978 in the tiny village of Xiaogang in China’s eastern Anhui Province.
At that time the country was still recovering from the chaos of the cultural revolution. Most arable land was collectivised into communes, a system that had helped push much of the country to the brink of starvation. According to Communist party legend, after consulting the village elders on how they could avoid starvation, 18 hungry peasant farmers in Xiaogang signed a secret pact dividing their commune’s land between them for each household to farm individually, a unilateral action that could easily have led to them all being executed as traitors.
Instead, their example was championed by senior reform-minded officials, including paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the “household responsibility system” be rolled out across the countryside. Peasant households were given 30-year contracts to use their land to grow what they wished and to keep or sell any surplus they produced. Capitalism had returned and the Chinese economic miracle had begun. This year is the 30th anniversary of the Xiaogang action and, during the next few years, the original land-lease contracts will start to expire. While the government has said it will extend them by another 30 years, the calls for reform are growing louder.
Deng’s presence still looms large over Xiaogang, making it easy to find. “Just turn right when you see Deng Xiaoping,” the locals advise. Sure enough, soon after exiting the shiny new interstate toll expressway, visitors come across a giant fading billboard picture of Deng smiling down magnanimously underneath characters that read: “Xiaogang, the first village in China to reform”. But Yan Junchang, the man credited with leading the Xiaogang action that launched China’s economic reform policy, has long since lost the rebellious streak that drove him to challenge the party and communal land system that was the very foundation of Maoist ideology.
“Under the leadership of my Communist party the land is not private but collectivised under socialism. Our party can’t go back to the old times when land was all privately owned because that was the reason we liberated the whole country in the revolution to begin with,” Mr Yan says, when asked whether he supports his modern-day counterparts.
Mr Zhang bristles when he hears what Mr Yan has to say about land reform these days. “What I know is that it was the communal land system that killed more than 30m people in the Great Leap Forward and it is the current system that is causing so much suffering today and must be changed,” he says. “After all, China is a revolutionary country, its revolution was a peasant’s revolution and the main issue for the peasants is land.”