RIGHTS-CHINA:
Property Law Denies Farmers the Good Earth
Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING, Mar 16 (IPS) - China's national parliament passed a
pioneering property law on Friday which, despite lofty sounding
clauses and media hype, fails to safeguard the ownership rights of
more than half of the population.
China's 750 million rural residents cannot own farmland, a legacy of
Maoist collectivisation in the 1950s which violently persecuted
landowners. Instead, they must lease from the state and have little or
no recourse when local officials move to take it. The new law does
nothing to change this reality.
"How can you enact a piece of national legislation, which is
inapplicable to some 60 percent of the country's population," muses
Wen Tiejun, a senior expert on rural issues at China Renmin University
in Beijing. "It only goes to show that China's rural and urban
division is going to continue for a long time."
This divide is on sore display on the fringes of China's booming
cities where peasants have witnessed close up the wealth accumulated
by their urban fellow countrymen while failing to become prosperous
themselves.
In Beijing where the government is proudly preparing to host the 2008
Olympic games, the building boom is blamed for depriving thousands of
people from their land. As the capital is expanding its airport,
building a new futuristic terminal to enable it to handle 60 million
travellers annually, peasants on the city outskirts have been forced
out of their land and cheated of their compensation.
"We didn't get even our noise compensation fee", says a villager from
Loutai, which has been slated for eviction and demolition. "Local
officials told us they would use the noise compensation fee paid by
the airport developer to build us cheap new housing, but we are
worried we will never see the money and we would still be asked to pay
a lot to buy the new houses,'' Gang, a Loutai villager in the Shunyi
area who wanted only his first name revealed, complained.
While the new property law is a milestone in China's rapid dismantling
of the foundations of the state-planned economy, its provisions would
benefit mainly homeowners in China's cities. Their numbers have risen
dramatically in recent years since the government stopped providing
free housing in the 1990s, as part of the socialist 'cradle-to-grave'
welfare system.
Enshrining private property rights in a legislation for the first time
since China's communist takeover in 1949, the law stipulates: "The
lawful property of individual person shall be protected by law, and
illegally taking possession, looting and destruction of such property
by any unit or individual is prohibited."
However symbolic in a country which is still nominally communist, the
new private property law does not alter the supremacy of state
ownership. All the land still technically belongs to the state, but in
the cities urbanities may now buy and sell their properties under
leases of between 50 and 70 years.
In the countryside, by contrast, farmers enjoy only land usage rights
over periods of time and not any title deeds that can be bought or
sold. Even for the limited time that peasants are allowed to use the
land, they are barred from borrowing against it to invest and expand
agricultural production.
True, no other piece of legislation has generated so much controversy
and debate. Yet the way this property reform ignores Chinese peasants
– the bulk of the country's population -- is hardly the most
contentious issue angering opponents of the law.
Ideology has been the buzzword ringing through a record seven readings
by top legislators and more than 100 working meetings of the National
People's Congress, China's parliament.
Old-style leftists have attacked the legislation for straying too far
from the Marxist foundations of communist China and embracing
capitalism. They worry the law could lead to a fire sale of state
assets and have blocked its passage for years.
Gong Xiantian, a leading Marxist economist and critic of the draft
law, argues that the law undermines the legal foundation of China's
socialist economy which is based on public ownership.
"Equal protection of private and public ownership is the feature of
the market economy, not a socialist economy," he says.
Chinese leaders have responded to the leftist concerns by allowing a
rare long public discussion. The revised draft of the law includes
lengthy paragraphs as to the primacy of the "socialist system" and the
"state ownership."
What the new legislation lacks though, advocates of farmers' rights
argue, are any provisions that protect farmers from land grabs. Local
governments that often work hand in gloves with greedy developers
would retain the power to convert agricultural land to other uses if
deemed so in the public interest.
"The new law would make little or no difference to the situation in
the countryside," says Wen Tiejun, the rural expert.
Many localities rely on these sales to finance their under funded
budgets – a trend which has lead to a wave of rural protest in the
country with complaints that they have been unfairly compensated.
Appropriation of land from farmers is the most frequent subject of
petitions by Chinese farmers, which when left unanswered, had
triggered an increased number of violent protests, researchers have
found.
Government officials "should not turn a deaf ear to farmers'
requests," warned a senior agricultural research recently. A single
petition could lead to a "mass incident" or even a riot, Chen Xiwen,
director of the government central group on rural work said.
The ministry of public security said 87,000 mass incidents were
reported in 2005, up 6.6 percent on 2004 and 50 percent on 2003. More
than 65 percent of "massive incidents" in rural areas are attributed
to land expropriation.
Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has called land the "core issue" facing
Chinese farmers. Last year he vowed harsh punishment for those who
seize farmland illicitly. But farmers continue losing land with
official figures stating that nearly 200,000 hectares of rural land
are taken from them every year for industrial purposes.
(END/2007)
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