OVER THE PAST YEAR, increasing numbers of the displaced and disaffected from across China have been descending on Beijing to seek redress of grievances. Reviving the ancient custom of shangfang–the practice of petitioning the central authority to right wrongs perpetrated by local officials–unemployed workers and dispossessed peasants, demobilized soldiers and victims of fly-by-night investment schemes are banding together and traveling to the capital. There, they stage sit-ins in front of the Complaints Office of the State Council, the National People’s Congress, the Central Disciplinary Commission, or the Central Organizational Department, recounting the transgressions of corrupt functionaries in the provinces, telling and retelling tales of homes destroyed and lives ruined, often to indifferent passersby and unresponsive officials.
A dramatic incident on July 18 brought the trend into sharp focus. Twenty-three petitioners climbed to the top of a 65-foot building in Beijing and threatened to jump. A five-hour standoff with police ensued, with thousands of petitioners and bystanders looking on. The group was eventually detained and charged with disturbing the peace.
Other petitioners at the scene told Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin Service that the group represented thousands of workers laid off by the Hegang City Mining Bureau in Heilongjiang province between 1996 and 1998. Ten days earlier, several thousand of these unemployed workers had blocked a rail line between Jixi and Harbin to protest the disappearance of funds earmarked for their severance benefits. Then they had selected 36 representatives to plead their case in the capital. When their petition fell on deaf ears, 23 decided to commit suicide. Three days later, another 200 petitioners from Heilongjiang arrived in Beijing and demonstrated outside the Complaints Office of the State Council, and 400 more were intercepted by police and sent back to Heilongjiang.
For these petitioners and many more, the central government holds out the last hope of correcting an unjust court ruling, an unfair severance package, or abusive treatment by local officials. The majority of the petitioners fall into three categories.
The first consists of workers laid off by state-owned enterprises whose severance benefits were cut or who feel they were short-changed in negotiations over their severance pay. Their complaints are often dismissed by local courts on grounds that they had signed legally binding documents. Many, however, claim to have signed their termination agreements with factory managers under duress. A second group consists of peasants deprived of their livelihood by government land requisitions. And the third consists of city dwellers with similar complaints. The requisitioning of land by local governments is fast becoming one of the most controversial issues in both rural and urban areas.
According to the People’s Daily, the official paper of the Chinese Communist party, the rapid industrialization and urbanization fueling China’s breakneck economic growth have resulted in 40 million peasants’ losing their land. On August 1, a land dispute in Henan province erupted into violence. Six hundred paramilitary police armed with tear gas and shotguns descended on the village of Shijiahe, near the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, to arrest the organizers of a protest against local officials who had allegedly embezzled profits totaling $4.8 million from sales of farmland. At least 50 villagers were injured in the clash. A woman in her 50s sustained shotgun wounds to her back and leg.
City dwellers have fared no better, and many who have been evicted from their homes to make way for new roads, factories, and office and housing developments have staged demonstrations in Beijing. Both peasants and urbanites who have been evicted from their homes complain of forcible removal and poor compensation.
The problem lies not with industrial development per se, but with China’s land-rights system. All land belongs to the state. Neither peasants, who farm land leased to them for 30 years, nor city dwellers own the land they inhabit. Local authorities “renegotiate” leases whenever they wish to seize land for development, which is ever more profitable. Cashing in on a bullish real estate market, local officials reap big profits from land sales. As a result, the number of poor, landless peasants is increasing sharply–at a rate of 2 million a year, according to the People’s Daily.
Official statistics record that the Chinese Ministry of Construction received 18,620 complaints regarding demolitions and forced evictions in the first six months of 2004–slightly more than it received in the entire year of 2003. China’s vice minister of construction, Fu Wenjuan, was recently quoted in the Hong Kong media as saying that half the current demand for real estate in China is being met by local government-backed demolitions and evictions.
Distrustful of local officials, disillusioned with the courts, and vulnerable because of their lack of property rights, petitioners look to Beijing for administrative fairness. It’s a challenge to the central government that is growing.
Jennifer Chou is director of Radio Free Asia’s Mandarin Service.
