The Chinese Clearances

Last year there were 280,000 so-called "mass incidents", including petitions, demonstrations and strikes, both peaceful and violent, in China. That's a huge rise on estimates for six years ago, when only around 90,000 such incidents were recorded. In many cases they were linked to anger over corruption and other forms of abuse of power such as illegal land seizures.

Wukan, a reasonably well-off place of 20,000, was not known as a hotbed for radicals. Then the authorities decided to sell the village's land for development without residents' consent. Corruption is at the heart of the Wukan case and the villagers complain about "land grabs" by corrupt local cadres. The protests were sparked by the seizure of hectares of land and their sale to property developer Country Garden for 1 billion yuan (£100m). After months of simmering protests at the imposition, Mr Xue put himself forward as a representative in negotiations that were supposed to bring the crisis to a close. Instead, Mr Xue died in police custody. Villagers have taken control of the town. In response, authorities have cut off food supplies.

In a drive to industrialise and urbanise, thousands of industrial parks and many thousands of real estate development projects have been, or are being, built at the costs of dispossessed farmers. The land requisition system deprives three to four million farmers of their land every year, and around 40-50 million are now dispossessed.

It was usually local officials who would carry out difficult negotiations with village collectives, or who were in charge of coercing defiant farmers to accept government terms. Having village cadres who shared their interests would not only lower the selling price but also determine whether or not the transaction could take place at all. Therefore, township and county officials in localities that experienced greater land requisition had a stronger incentive to manipulate village democracies to make sure that more co-operative cadres were elected.

One township party secretary interviewed in Fujian province said: "If election rules are followed strictly, we will lose control of the rural society. Village cadres will be afraid of villagers, not the township government. They can put off assignments from the township government and compromise the tasks during implementation. Therefore … local officials are willing to introduce rules that subvert the true meaning of village democracy. This is also the case in Wukan in which farmers are protesting not only against local governments, but also against villager cadres who worked with the authorities in abusive land requisition."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/16/china-land-grab-undermining-democracy