Chaiqian - the Chinese Clearances

50 million Chinese farmers have lost their homes over the past three decades as part of an urbanization policy that has swelled city dwellers to about 50 percent of the population, from 21 percent in 1982. The land seizures frequently lead to local officials violating farmers’ rights. Land disputes are the leading cause of surging unrest across China, according to an official study published in June. The number of so-called mass incidents - protests, riots, strikes and other disturbances - doubled in five years to almost 500 a day in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
“Forced evictions are one of the biggest sources of public unrest and public dissatisfaction with the government because they are unstoppable,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch. “We’ve seen an avalanche of forced evictions and illegal demolitions.”

Termed “chaiqian” in Chinese, the demolition and relocation of communities has become increasingly controversial. Cities have been grabbing land to finance operations and pay back or restructure mushrooming debt that reached at least 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.68 trillion) by the end of 2010. Almost a quarter of that is backed by land, according to China’s National Audit Office. City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. Land sales make up 30 percent of total local government revenue and in some cities account for more than half, according to Wang Tao, a Hong Kong-based economist for UBS AG. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.
.“The high price of land leads to local governments being predatory,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai who was formerly Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist.

Cities may have to accelerate land sales as they struggle to repay the debt, said Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies China’s local- government finances. There’s also an incentive for officials to keep payments to farmers as low as possible. “Without suppressing land compensation, local governments can’t make the margins to pay back the banks,” Shih said. “In essence, they are the engines of inequality in China. Land development is the redistribution of income from average households to rich households.”

“The local governments earn a lot of money from the price difference between what they compensate farmers and villagers for their land and what they sell to developers,” said Wang Erping, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

“It breaks my heart that they demolished my home,” said Zou “They tore my house down with no regard for where I would live, but they themselves live in high-class homes,” He said of the officials

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