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| Farmland in Changchun, Jilin province. (File photo/Xinhua) |
After it
became the country's only ruling party 63 years ago, the Communist Party of
China is now looking back to where it started on its way to the national power:
solving land problems for farmers.
In his
keynote report to the 18th National Congress on Thursday, Chinese President Hu
Jintao has pressed the party to reform the land expropriation system and
increase farmers' share of gain in land value. "We should give more to
farmers and take less from them," Hu told the party in his speech at the
opening of the congress, which was televised nationwide Thursday.
Hu promised
the party will ensure equal exchange of factors of production and balance
allocation of public resources between urban and rural areas.
The pledge,
the first of its kind the party has ever made in its national congress reports,
came at a time when massive protests by farmers over land seizures erupted in
multiple villages across the country over the past years.
The reform
of the land expropriation system, if proceeds as promised, means that the
Chinese government will no longer sacrifice the property rights of farmers to
reduce the cost of the country's industrialization and urbanization.
According
to China's existing land system, rural collectives, usually a rural village
committee, rather than farmers themselves, own the land in rural areas, a
systematic arrangement that came into being in China after several land reforms
initiated by the party lifted it to national power.
Historians
believe the widespread support the Communist Party once had from farmers was
one of the major factors that helped it become China's ruling party after it
confiscated land from landlords and allocated them to peasants for free in the
revolutionary era.
Late leader
Mao Zedong attributed the party's course to national power to a strategy of
"using the rural areas to encircle the cities."
The reform
and opening up that catapulted China into its current position of the world's
second-largest economy also originated from Xiaogang village in east China's
Anhui province, where farmers secretly contracted farmland from the collective
in 1978 when most villages in the country were still struggling to make their
ends meet in collective farms.
The
practice at Xiaogang village was later applied to the rest of the countryside,
as rural collectives distributed land-use rights to households through
contracts of 30-year "household management."
Yet under
the existing rules, the state can nationalize the collective-owned land over
reasons like "public interests" and transfer farmland for industrial
and construction use.
To build more
homes for migrant workers flocking to cities and towns amid the country's rapid
urbanization, local governments grabbed a number of land from farmers over the
years, then sold them to industrial and housing developers, but offered very
little compensation to rural residents.
Moreover,
farmers are deprived of any gains in the land value after their farmland is
expropriated, thus fueling increasing discontent and complaints from farmers,
including those living at Wukan village in the city of Shanwei in south China's
Guangdong province.
A year ago,
Wukan made international headlines when the village's residents staged three
waves of large-scale rallies over four months to protest against village
officials' illegal land seizures, corruption and violations of financing and
election rules.
"Under
the current land expropriation system, farmers are almost excluded from
benefits of land price appreciation," said Xu Xiaojing, director of the
Research Department of Rural Economy with the Development Research Center, a
government thinktank under the State Council, China's cabinet.
He said the
current compensation standard for expropriated land is too low, thus limiting
farmers from sharing the revenues of increases in land prices.
"In
fact, those farmers who lost their land have been unfairly thrown out from
China's industrialization and urbanization process," Xu said. "This
is absurd."
In many
villages, villagers usually get a reimbursement between 450,000 yuan and
750,000 yuan (about US$75,000-$120,000) for each hectare of farmland
expropriated, but local governments can cash in millions of yuan in revenue on
auctioning a hectare of rural land.
Yang
Yuying, a female farmer living in the suburbs of Hefei, the capital of Anhui
province, became one of the victims of the unfair land seizure system in the
country.
Yang and
her family were compensated less than 1 million yuan (US$160,000), along with a
90-square-meter housing unit, when their land was seized by the local
government.
"The
compensation looks quite a lot of money, but we've lost our land and can't
enjoy the same treatment in employment, medicare and education as urban
residents do," Yang said. "Our lives have no guarantee, and even my
kid has to pay extra fees to go to school in the city."
As China's
urbanization has driven over half of the country's population of 1.3 billion
into cities and towns, many farmers like Yang are having their land seized by
local governments without property compensation, thus sowing the seeds of
unrest in the country.
"The
unfair treatment farmers face in land seizures are now the primary source of
complaints and social unrest in the country," said Wang Kaiyu, a
sociologist who has conducted field investigations in rural China for a long
time.
"In
reforming the land expropriation system, the government should appropriately
raise the one-off compensations to farmers, but establishing a mechanism to guarantee
their long-term lives is even more important," Wang said.
