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Mass land grabs in China fuel unrest
(AFP)

22 January 2006


TUANFAN VILLAGE, China - Liang Fengying has farmed this land in her Chinese village for the past four decades - but she is about to work her last harvest here.

Hemmed in by a motorway, new concrete houses and nearby factories, the land has been requisitioned by the government. In a story being repeated across the booming south of China, she will soon have nothing left to farm.

“I’m just working here until they come and start filling this place with sand. When they come, you just have to leave,” says the 53-year-old Liang, whose face is tanned and wrinkled from long years of labour in the sun.

“I have farmed all my life, ever since I was a little girl,” she says. “But at my age, who would employ me now, I ask you? What can I do?”

Liang is only one of millions of poor and uneducated farmers across China, particularly in the prosperous province of Guangdong, who have lost their only source of livelihood in the face of China’s speeding industrial growth.

For many, the minuscule compensation they receive is simply not enough to keep them alive, and the farmers usually have little legal recourse to fight back.

“Whatever they say, we have to go along with it,” Liang says.

But their frustrations are increasingly boiling over into violent confrontations with authorities.

A sit-in protest by thousands of villagers last week in Panlong village, just six kilometres (four miles) away from Liang’s, erupted into a demonstration of up to 20,000 people.

Thousands of police used tear gas and beat people with electric batons to break up the crowd, according to witnesses.

Several Panlong villagers told AFP that up to 60 people were injured and at least one person - a 13-year-old girl - died when police in riot gear indiscriminately attacked demonstrators on a highway.

Peace has been restored but tensions remain high. Residents spoke of relentless police intimidation and authorities continued to seek out and expel reporters, including two AFP correspondents.

Villagers said emotions were still raw and warned of more protests if their plight goes unheeded.

“People’s livelihood is suffering because of the land compensation. We have approached the village government so many times but nothing happened,” a villager, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, told AFP.

“At this rate there will be more peasant uprisings - and the more you crack down on them, the worse it will get,” he said.

Others said they were furious that local authorities had blamed farmers for “making trouble” and defended the police action as ”civilised” and necessary.

“I fumed when I saw these reports,” said a villager surnamed Yang, who was hit by police and detained for 11 hours.

“This incident wouldn’t have happened if they had compensated us reasonably,” he said.

Villagers say the local government started selling their farmland to enterprises more than 10 years ago, and has given each villager just 400 to 700 yuan (49 to 86 dollars) in annual compensation.

They say they simply put up with that amount for years. But now the rapidly rising prices due to China’s economic boom have pushed them to the brink.

“Our lives depend entirely on our land, this is what we rely on for the rest of our lives,” one villager said. “Without money, we’ll die.”

In the past few months alone, Guangdong province has seen several major cases of unrest. As many as 30 protesters were shot dead by police in a confrontation in Dongzhou village last month, according to residents there.

Rage over the land grabs is often heightened by resentment at corruption in the government. Officials often collude with property developers and businesses to sell the land at huge discounts and then pocket the difference themselves.

“The village officials, they go on gambling and prostitution trips (in Macau), they drive big cars and build themselves big new houses,” said one villager in Tuanfan, where Liang lives.

“These buildings go up one after another ... and these luxury cars, where does the money come from?” said another local named Chen. “How come the government has never investigated them?”

Aware that riots have risen sharply in recent years, China’s leaders are beginning to recognise that economic growth alone is no longer enough to maintain social stability.

“Some regions are illegally requisitioning farmers’ land without giving reasonable compensation and means of living, hence leading to demonstrations in villages,” Premier Wen Jiabao said in comments published Friday.

“This is still a salient issue which affects the stability of villages and even the whole society. Party committees and governments of all levels must attach a high level of importance to this,” he said.

Although Zhongshan city officials were sent to Panlong last week to meet with village representatives, Chen, one of the villagers, said he remained pessimistic as long as corrupt officials remain in power.

“I don’t trust them. We’ve complained for long enough and they have done nothing,” he said.

“The most crucial thing now for the central government is to crack down on corruption, otherwise there will only be more uprisings,” he said. “For the time being, most people are just bottling up their anger.”

 



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