China's rural harmony

Five years ago, Xu Kun and Feng Guangmei ran a shop in the fishing village of Baihutou, or White Tiger Head, in southern China's Guangxi region. Many residents of the beachside village were prospering as more and more tourists arrived to enjoy the nearby white sands. But everything changed in mid-2007, when the local government announced plans to relocate the villagers and demolish their homes to make way for a tourist resort.
The villagers were shocked as they thought they owned the land rights. Many of them decided to challenge the local government's right to sell the land. "We didn't want to move because we relied on the sea for our living," Feng told dpa in Beijing recently, explaining that many people in White Tiger Head still fished.
Feng's husband, Xu Kun, was sentenced to four years in prison in April for illegal business activity. Xu's appeal against his sentence was turned down and Feng's petitioning of higher officials in Guangxi and Beijing drew a blank, she said. Feng claims that Xu was persecuted because he led the land protesters and won election to the post of village head in 2008 and 2009.
His protests in White Tiger Head ended after he barricaded himself inside the village office as he was surrounded by scores of riot police. Such scenes are becoming more common across China as a growing number of protesters fight alleged corruption and secret land deals by local officials.
Xu was luckier than at least two other leaders of village revolts, according to activists who accuse local police and officials of covering up the murders of Qian Yunhui and Xue Jinbo. Villagers in the neighbouring southern province of Guangdong plan to hold Xue's funeral on Friday in Wukan, where thousands of people have occupied the centre of the village this week as riot police lay siege.
Xue, 42, was arrested following protests and clashes with police in Wukan in September over local property developments and alleged evictions. The government has pointed out that Xue died of a heart attack, but activists have linked his death to that of Qian, another village land activist who was crushed by a truck in the eastern province of Zhejiang in December 2010.
"He's definitely been beaten to death," one Wukan villager said of Xue on Thursday. Some national state media have carried reports quoting villagers who alleged that Xue and Qian were murdered, reflecting the ruling Communist Party's efforts to distance itself from such disputes and put the blame on local officials.
But experts and some officials in Beijing have warned that illegal land use could become a much bigger problem that threatens the party's efforts to develop a "stable and harmonious" countryside. "Illegal confiscation has become a large threat to the land rights of Chinese farmers, and conflicts related to land can even influence the stability of the country's rural society," the official China Daily newspaper said recently.
The newspaper quoted a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank, as saying that 180 out of 1,564 villages surveyed had reported illegal appropriation of land last year. The government has introduced new regulations designed to curb abuses of land rights and end forcible demolitions by giving more powers to courts, although the courts work closely with party officials.
Government researcher Liu Shouying told the newspaper that reports of illegal land use had continued to rise despite the new regulations. "The land disputes in rural China are devastating, because the land supply cannot meet the soaring demand for economic development," Liu said.
Land disputes were a major cause of the tens of thousands of "mass incidents" reported annually by the government, Ethan Michelson, a sociologist at Indiana University, said in Beijing earlier this year. "It does appear to be the single most important cause of conflict," Michelson said of the land appropriation, but he added that it was "not as big a problem" as it had appeared to be from a study in 2002.
Michelson's study last year of protests in China found that rural residents had "many specific complaints about the local implementation of central policies." "But there is evidence to support the argument that the policies are failing and that the political legitimacy in rural areas is declining," he said.