There is no shortage of candidates for the biggest issue facing China these days, but one Chinese magazine has named its choice: land ownership. In its latest issue China Newsweek writes (per translation by China Digital Times):
The most serious economic, social and even political issues nowadays are all, directly or indirectly, connected with the land system. China’s current land system is getting closer and closer to a tipping point where reform will be necessary.
The main premise of this argument is, nearly all major players involved with land, from local governments to real estate developers, to suburban farmers and citizens and villagers in the country, have motivation to break the land-related laws, regulations and policies.
If a system has come to such a point, it demonstrates that the system itself has got a problem, and the only solution is “reform.”
The questions over rural land ownership influence other problems like corruption and even the growing wealth gap. In the Chinese countryside farmers have rights to use land, but not to sell it. Under collective ownership that power is in the hands of local officials, who often treat the revenue from any sale as their private earnings. It is one of the most common forms of corruption in China, and also one of the most destabilizing, as shortchanged farmers take their protests to the streets.
Last fall I wrote about a case of this type of corruption and the results in Guangdong. Angry townspeople took over their village office. The higher authorities didn’t respond for months. Now one of the leaders has been arrested, but the protest goes on. This case is a small-scale example of the problem. In the northern Chinese province of Heilongjiang a large-scale example is unfolding. In December an open letter was published online decrying the seizure of land that is home to 40,000 farmers and announcing it was being turned over to individual ownership, a move that resulted in the detention of some of the signers. Similar cases flared up last month in Shaanxi, Jiangsu and Tianjin.
In a 2006 article titled “How to make China even richer,” the Economist argued that giving the land to the people would benefit tens of millions of farmers. But the piece notes that change won’t be made without a fight from diehard socialists who cling to one of the last tenets of the old era. A few weeks after the Heilongjiang letter came out, a Communist Party official declared collective ownership wasn’t going anywhere.