Farmers Rise In Challenge To Chinese Land Policy

A meeting of farmers Dec. 19 in Changchunling initiated a movement that has spread across China, challenging the policy of collective land ownership. (Special To The Washington Post)
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"It is a historic lesson," Zhen Xinli, deputy director of the Communist Party Central Committee's policy research office, said at a news conference Dec. 26. "China's socialist system and the constitution have ensured collective ownership for rural land."

The issue has long been key in Chinese communist ideology. During China's civil war, Mao Zedong's forces gathered millions of peasants to support his movement against the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek on the strength of promises to rid the country of hated private landlords and give the land to those who farmed it.

Because of what appears to be a firm party stand, the farmers' current efforts to change the system might not survive China's repressive security apparatus.

In Changchunling, dozens of police officers burst in and tried to break up the Dec. 19 meeting half an hour after it began, farmers recalled. Yu Changwu, who had helped organize a similar meeting 10 days earlier at nearby Dong Nan'an village, was imprisoned almost immediately, they said. Liu Zhenyu, a fellow activist also taken into custody, was recently released, associates said.

"We are risking our lives to divide up our land," said a Changchunling farmer. "We have stuck out our necks. But no matter what happens to us, no matter what price we have to pay, we must get our lands back."

The Fujin city propaganda department dismissed the farmers' claims as meaningless statements by people who do not represent their villages. The declaration, it said, was "a distortion of the facts, deviating from the facts and intentionally spreading rumors."

Farmers in the Fujin area have become cautious in talking about their movement, demanding anonymity and cloaking visitors from police or possible informers along the snow-blown lanes that connect their low-lying villages. In their view, the police have been ordered to protect not only the socialist system of land ownership but also corrupt officials in Fujin city who have profited from sales of farmland to developers.

"More than half the officials in Fujin city should get the death penalty, they are so corrupt," said a farmer standing in the snow at the main intersection of Dong Nan'gang.

Because many of China's 700 million farmers similarly distrust officials, the idea of private land ownership has found a ready audience. Land sales by local officials have been the main cause of peasant riots that have erupted frequently across China over the past several years.

But here in the Fujin area, farmers have not just exploded in anger, but have taken on the system that gives officials their power over the land. Moreover, they have coordinated with other farmers via the Internet and sought tactical advice from democracy advocates in Beijing who see an opportunity to advance their political agenda.

"It is a frontal challenge," one activist said.

The activist, who discussed his work on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that he had written the communique issued by the Fujin farmers and influenced their decision to declare private ownership of their land. In the declaration, he sought to turn the Communist Party's historical recrimination against landlords on its head, saying that local officials abuse farmers in the same way as landlords did before 1949.

"They have actually become landlords," the farmers' declaration said. "And farmers have been forced to become serfs. We decided to change the structure of land ownership and protect the land rights of farmers through family or individual ownership."

The activists' hope is that the Fujin privatization movement can turn out like a celebrated farmers' revolt at Xiaogang village in Anhui province in 1978. After the farmers rebelled against the communal system then in force and demanded their own plots of land, the Beijing government undertook changes that led to the current system of 30-year leases on family plots.

Some scholars and researchers with party-affiliated institutes have also suggested that giving farmers some kind of ownership rights is the only way to resolve recurring unrest in the countryside. When riots break out, they have noted, the main reason often is farmers' frustration with local officials who want to sell village land to developers.

"This is the only way we can protect our land against the corrupt officials," said a farmer who participated in the attempt to redistribute Changchunling's land.