Significant Shift in Focus of Peasants Rights Activism

Significant Shift in Focus of Peasants’ Rights Activism

Zhao Ling

An Interview with Rural Development Researcher Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Translation by Manfred Elfstrom from an article first published in the Chinese newspaper 《南方周末》 (Southern Weekend). This translation was first published on China Elections & Governance.

Translator’s note:

Relying mainly on a recent Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) study, this article describes how the focus of peasant activism has moved from tax disputes to property rights, particularly in eastern areas of China, where urbanization has encroached on farmland, and where local governments are eager to make up for tax shortfalls with lucrative land sales.

The author often quotes the leader of the CASS study, professor Yu Jianrong, who believes that Chinese law must be revised to give peasants more control over their land, and who does not believe that rural migration to cities alone will solve the problem.

Mr. Yu recommends an overhaul of China’s land ownership laws.

Landless peasant Li Zheng came to Beijing in 1998 to fight for peasant‘ rights and has never returned to his home in Sichuan. In 1992, his hometown confiscated 15,000 mu of land and displaced 30,000 peasants to build a high tech zone. The peasants were inadequately compensated and the sanction of appropriate government bureaus was not sought. Mr. Li vows to win justice for landless peasants.

Mr. Li is similar to another Sichuanese of eleven years ago, Zhang Dean. Mr. Zhang used ‘‘big character’‘ posters and other means to publicize the central government‘s policies and organize peasants to resist unfair tax burdens.

In recent years, it has been hard to find people like Zhang Dean, but one often encounters people like Li Zheng making appeals to officials. Complicated land rights disputes have replaced the old struggles of the countryside.

I. Characteristics of the new focus

Between August 2003 and June 2004, the Institute of Rural Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) conducted a study of the dynamics of today‘s rural Chinese society. Among other things, the study showed that the focus of the struggle for peasants‘ rights has shifted. The CASS study relied on various sources. The main source was the Chinese media. Researchers discovered that out of 60,000 news pieces, the number one news subject was ‘‘the three rural problems,’‘ of which land disputes was the most common problem. Peasants‘ taxes, long thought to be the countryside‘s biggest issue, accounted for only 1.9% of news stories.

The CASS team also gathered together more than 130 cases of rural disturbances from 2004, and found that 87 of these disturbances had their roots in land disputes. A related government department‘s statistics show that in the first part of this year alone, there were 46,900 cases of illegal land activities. Other studies affirm this, such as a study of 20,000 letters to media outlets, a study of 720 peasants who traveled to Beijing to appeal to authorities, and studies by the Ministry of Land Resources and government agencies.

CASS research team head Yu Jianrong said that in 2002, land disputes had already risen to become the most serious problem for peasants‘ rights.

He went on to tell this reporter that most of these land disputes spring from local governments illegally or forcefully confiscating land, or from compensation for land being too low. These two kinds of incidents accounted for 33% and 23% respectively of 837 letters appealing to authorities that Yu Jianrong showed this reporter.

While in the ‘‘tax/fee period,’‘ individual villagers or groups of villagers led campaigns, village- level political organizations are becoming important leaders of ‘‘land period’‘ movements. This is because the interests of village-level organizations and peasants are often the same when it comes to seizures of land. It is common for men and women, old and young to all take part in these campaigns. According to landless peasant Li Zheng, for a peasant family, land is not just the interest of one generation, but of several generations. Therefore, all must help defend it. Land disputes mainly occur near urban areas, with the defendants in land legal cases concentrated in city and county governments; defendants in tax cases are still mostly found in village and township governments. Interestingly, in addition to government officials, realty companies and ‘‘development zones’‘ are increasingly defendants in land dispute trials.

While the focus of peasant activism has shifted, the location of activism has also made a quiet shift. Tax disputes were (and are) concentrated in central China; land disputes mostly occur in more developed coastal areas. According to Yu Jianrong, ‘‘The east‘s economy is more developed, so its land is more valuable than land in the center. Eastern land can be sold immediately, and this makes local governments try to control it.’‘

The language of protecting rights is also undergoing a fundamental change. Because peasant‘s tax complaints had the clear support of national government policies, the catch phrase of anti-tax movements was often, ‘‘Carry out the central government‘s policy, lighten the burden on peasants.’‘ Land issues have an even closer relationship to peasants‘ lives, so the language has become even more direct: ‘‘Without land, how can we exist?’‘ There has been more outside involvement in land issues, too. Peasants who have lost their land or suffered other damages have been adroit at using different channels to appeal to the society. Legal experts are very much a part of these movements. Out of 837 written appeals to authorities about land problems, lawyers or other legal experts wrote 49.

II. Background to the change

For the past ten years, peasants‘ rights activism has changed with the development of the economy. The facts show that in the decade after 1992, the previously most difficult rural problem, taxation, was solved. The most difficult problem in the countryside since 2002 has been land. But why exactly did this shift occur?

Since the mid-1980s, peasants‘ tax problems were obvious. In the ten years since 1992, the government implemented a significant tax reform, separating the source from tax income of the township and county and other agencies from the state tax income source. According to Yu Jianrong, because of a lag in structural reform, many levels of local government were overstaffed. County and township administrative funds were insufficient to pay for all the government employees, putting local leadership under great pressure. Local governments transferred this burden to peasants. After 2001, the peasants‘ burden began to lighten because of fee-for-tax reform, and tax-related conflicts abated. However, the financial situation in areas whose administrations had relied heavily on taxes became even worse.

In 2003, China‘s average per person GDP passed US $1000 for the first time; the country had entered a period of rapid urbanization. With rapid urbanization, cities needed to expand. This made land become the main source of local government‘s finances.

Urbanization and the use of farmland for non-agricultural purposes had been building for some time. From 1990 to 2002, non-agricultural construction for the whole country claimed 473,260,000 mu of land. This non-agricultural construction was concentrated on the outskirts of cities and in high population / small land and economically developed areas. People in these areas on average cultivated less than 0.7 mu of fields per person; each mu that was used for construction led 1.4 people to become landless. According to the calculations of researchers, in 13 years, 66,300,000 people employed in agriculture lost their land. This pace of urbanization only increased, bringing money to local governments, but displacing more and more peasants.

Many experts believe that to solve the ‘‘three agricultural problems,’‘ the country must transfer more peasants to cities, reducing the total number of agricultural workers. Yu Jianrong thinks that this kind of reasoning fits the historical experiences of developed countries, but China‘s urbanization has been built on the dichotomy of urban and rural sectors with no free movement for the population, and on the ambiguous nature of peasants‘ land ownership rights.”

Yu Jianrong says that although current law states that of all rural land belongs to ‘‘peasant collectives,’‘ it does not explain the internal workings ‘‘peasant collectives’‘ or the relationship between ‘‘peasant collectives’‘ and individual peasants‘ interests. In practice, the authority of collectives is trumped by the power of the land user, weakening relevant laws. The state is the real owner of all land.

Under these conditions, peasants cannot make decisions about whether or not to sell land or to whom it is sold, much less negotiate prices with the buyer.

III. The significance of the movement to protect peasants‘ rights

Yu Jianrong believes that the abrupt rise in land disputes in the last two years comes not only from the contradictions brought about by urbanization, but also from the encouraging ‘‘focus on the people’‘ management style of China‘s new generation of leaders. The explosion of land disputes shows China‘s increasingly open atmosphere and ordinary people‘s increasing trust in the government.

Policymakers and experts have continuously pondered ways to solve the problem of landless peasants. There have been efforts to manage land better, strictly control the confiscation of land, raise compensation, and improve the social conditions of landless peasants, etc.

Yu Jianrong says that the first task of reformers should be to clarify peasants‘ rights, instead. The nation‘s laws should be used to give the land back to peasants. Only after this is done should the country consider using the different tools of urbanization to solve the problem, explore creating a system for peasants to move directly to cities, etc.

Systems of farmland management have always had a profound effect on society and politics. America‘s experience should be held as a cautionary lesson for China. During America‘s economic development, urbanization moved very quickly, disregarding the land rights of peasants. The result was that a large of number of peasants lost their land and became migrants, increasing the country’s serious gap between rich and poor and bringing America a long period of instability.

In January 2003, Premier Wen Jiabao said to a working meeting on agriculture that many land confiscation programs do not give peasants fair compensation, do not provide for peasants‘ livelihood, and create landless and jobless peasants. He further said that this endangers rural stability and even the stability of the whole country.

Yu Jianrong believes that peasants‘ rights activism and national politics have a complicated relationship. The policies of the new generation of government leaders have excited rights protectors and obtained the trust of peasants. Peasants‘ rights movements, in turn, have influenced the government, helping it understand the situation of peasants and change laws accordingly.

For example, because of spreading peasants‘ movements, the central government made declarations on peasants‘ tax burdens in 1985, 1990, 1993 and 1996. The government‘s attitude toward the taxes changed from ‘‘a complication to be eliminated’‘ to ‘’ a political problem’‘ to ‘‘a very pressing political responsibility’‘ all the way to ‘‘the most important issue to be worked on.’‘ There are researchers who believe that the form of China‘s peasantry has changed in the course of the movement to protect peasant rights. Peasants have obtained political experience through their efforts to protect their legal rights, and have broadened their political appeal. However, incidents of rights protection have not changed Chinese society‘s basic structure; they have merely allowed peasants to use the law to pursue their natural legal rights.

Yu Jianrrong thinks that peasant activism‘s change of focus, from ‘‘tax struggle’‘ to ‘‘protecting land rights,’‘ shows that in terms of the countryside‘s interests, we still have a ways to go until we solve the underlying causes of the “three agricultural problems.”