Leaving the Land
警察把我全家从屋里拉出来就强行拆呢我家350平米的房子。难道我们政府就这样的腐败？太让人民失望呢！
- 盛世飞天_76635, 重庆 北碚区, via Sina Weibo
Picking Death Over Eviction
By IAN JOHNSON
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
Every night for the past eight months, residents have
formed a ring around Zhuguosi, a rural village in southwestern China,
to prevent demolition crews from destroying it.
Some farmers commit suicide to protest eviction, a reminder of how
China’s new urbanization push is at times a violent struggle with a
powerful state.
- | Video |
Leaving the Land
Picking Death Over Eviction
Articles
in this series look at how China’s government-driven effort to push the
population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for
millenniums has been defined by its rural life.
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点击查看本文中文版 | Read in Chinese »
Every night for the past eight months, residents
have formed a ring around Zhuguosi, a rural village in southwestern
China, to prevent demolition crews from destroying it. Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
As she drove down a busy four-lane road near her old home, Tang Huiqing
pointed to the property where her dead sister’s workshop once stood. The
lot was desolate, but for Ms. Tang it lives.
Four years ago, government officials told her sister that Chengdu was
expanding into the countryside and that her village had to make way. A
farmer who had made the transition to manufacturer, she had built the
small workspace with her husband. Now, officials said, it would be torn
down.
“So my sister went up to the roof and said, ‘If you want to, tear it down,’ ” Ms. Tang said.
Leaving the Land
Part 1
China's Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities
Part 2
Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City
Her voice trailed off as she recalled how her sister poured diesel fuel
on herself and after pleading with the demolition crew to leave, set
herself alight. She died 16 days later.
Over the past five years, at least 39 farmers have resorted to this
drastic form of protest. The figures, pieced together from Chinese news
reports and human rights organizations, are a stark reminder of how
China’s new wave of urbanization is at times a violent struggle between a
powerful state and stubborn farmers — a top-down project that is
different from the largely voluntary migration of farmers to cities
during the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s.
Besides the self-immolations, farmers have killed themselves by other
means to protest land expropriation. One Chinese nongovernmental
organization, the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch, reported that in
addition to 6 self-immolations last year, 15 other farmers killed
themselves. Others die when they refuse to leave their property: last
year, a farmer in the southern city of Changsha who would not yield was
run over by a steamroller, and last month, a 4-year-old girl in Fujian
Province was struck and killed by a bulldozer while her family tried to
stop an attempt to take their land.
Video | 4:56
Urban, but Left Behind
In China, the timeline for moving 250 million rural
residents into cities by 2025 is so rapid and far-reaching that it is
raising concerns that some people will be left behind.Jonah Kessel/The New York Times
Amid the turmoil, the government is debating new policies to promote
urbanization. A plan to speed up urbanization was supposed to have been
unveiled earlier this year, but it has been delayed over concerns that
the move to cities is already stoking social tensions. New measures are
also being contemplated to increase rural residents’ property rights.
In the past, many farmers chose to leave their land for better-paying
jobs in the city. Many still do, but farmers are increasingly thrown off
their land by officials eager to find new sources of economic growth.
The tensions are especially acute on the edge of big Chinese cities.
After having torn down the historic centers of most Chinese cities and
sold the land to developers, officials now target the rural areas on the
outskirts of cities like Chengdu.
But such plans are opposed by local farmers. Many do not want to leave
the land, believing they can earn more in agriculture than in factory
work. Farmers on the outskirts of Chengdu, near the workshop where Tang
Fuzhen committed suicide, say they can easily earn several hundred
dollars a month, pay that dwarfs government compensation offers. Others,
like Ms. Tang, have already made the leap from agriculture to industry.
A Village vs. Demolition Crews
A mile north of Ms. Tang’s demolished workshop is the village of
Zhuguosi, whose residents have been involved in tense standoffs with the
police since 2010. The village is to be torn down for Chengdu’s New
Financial City. The district abuts the city’s extravagant new government
complex, which has buildings modeled on Hong Kong’s waterfront
exhibition center and the Beijing Olympic stadium known as the Bird’s
Nest.
Every night now for the past eight months, residents have formed a ring
around their village to prevent demolition crews from destroying it.
Some of the houses have been torn down, but others remain, and cows
still graze the fertile land — a surreal sight with the new city
government buildings in the background.
“If we don’t oppose this, then we don’t have anything,” said Han Liang, a
31-year-old who is one of 80 to 90 villagers who keep watch each night.
“We have lost our land.”
As in other land expropriation cases around Chengdu, government
officials declined to comment. But according to deeds and correspondence
provided by the villagers, most were offered compensation of roughly
$1,500 per mu (one-sixth of an acre) — inadequate, in their view,
because the payments amount to only what they earn in a couple of years.
While none of the residents of Zhuguosi have committed suicide, they
have faced off with the authorities. The police have encircled villagers
and carried them off, and photographs indicate that some have been
beaten.
According to the Tianwang Web site,
which monitors grass-roots protests, Chengdu routinely has several
violent confrontations on its outskirts each day. Nationally, China has
tens of thousands of similar conflicts a year, according to government
estimates.
An Ancient Form of Dissent
The suicides, while not numerous relative to the overall population,
represent the outrage that many farmers feel when their land is taken
away. Suicide has been used as a form of political protest in China
since at least the third century B.C., when the poet and statesman Qu
Yuan drowned himself. Self-immolations have historically been practiced
more by Buddhist and Daoist clergy members, and imitated by other people
as a form of protest.
The residents of Zhuguosi have been involved in
tense standoffs with the police since 2010. The village is to be torn
down to make way for Chengdu’s New Financial City.
“It fits in with the historical pattern,” said Dr. Michael R. Phillips,
director of the Shanghai Suicide Research and Prevention Center and
professor of psychiatry at Emory University. “It’s a lever to change the
behavior of powerful people who you don’t have influence over.”
The deaths come even as suicides in China are declining. After being
among the highest in the world, rates have dropped 50 percent over the
past 20 years, according to epidemiological studies.
Most of these rural self-immolations take place outside the public eye.
Ms. Tang’s suicide was initially covered in the local news media and on
the Web, but reporters were later barred from talking to the Tang
family, journalists and family members say. Other families say that even
local Chinese news media were often blocked by plainclothes police
officers from entering their homes to conduct interviews.
That contrasts sharply with the government’s efforts to publicize
self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Chinese rule of their region and
to prosecute people accused of helping the protesters.
“It is striking how differently the two are treated,” said
Corinna-Barbara Francis, a China researcher for Amnesty International.
“They are trying to cover up the issue in the countryside.”
That may be because the government cannot claim, as it does with the
Tibetans, that foreign forces are behind the suicides. Instead,
government policies seem to be the cause of the tens of thousands of
episodes of unrest recorded by the government each year. Exact
statistics are not available, but Chinese researchers estimated that in
2010 the country had 180,000 protests, with the majority related to land
disputes.
An analysis of the suicides shows that many of those who took their
lives, like Ms. Tang, tasted prosperity and were incensed that it was
being taken from them. According to relatives and neighbors, the Chengdu
city government had offered Ms. Tang 800,000 renminbi, or about
$131,000 at current exchange rates, for her workshop. Given that
commercial property in the same district sells for 20 to 30 times that
amount, Ms. Tang was unwilling to sell.
The exact financial details of her garment business are unclear. Ms.
Tang and her husband ran the business together, and after her death he
left Chengdu. But her sister estimates that Ms. Tang spent more than the
government’s offer on fixed assets alone, like equipment and lighting.
“The government said it needed the land to widen the road, but we didn’t
think they’d tear down the building,” said Ms. Tang’s sister, Tang
Huiqing.
A Workshop Under Siege
After months of negotiations, Tang Huiqing said she was feeding her
8-month-old grandchild at 5 a.m. on Nov. 13, 2009, when men dressed in
camouflage and carrying metal rods surrounded her sister’s workshop.
Family members quickly arrived to defend it. The men and the family
members began quarreling, and one of Ms. Tang’s brothers was beaten and
suffered a broken rib, according to family members and a report on the
compensation that he later received from the city.
Ms. Tang retreated to the roof and shouted down at the men, according to her sister, who watched the events unfold.
China’s new wave of urbanization is at times a violent struggle between a powerful state and stubborn farmers.Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
“When she was on the roof she heard us being beaten,” Tang Huiqing said.
“She called out, ‘Brother, sister, are you being beaten to death?’ She
didn’t get an answer. She said for everyone to stop, for everyone to sit
down and consult and negotiate. But no one listened to her.”
Then she doused herself and set herself on fire, an event captured by
onlookers’ cellphones. A few days later the workshop was torn down and
family members received compensation for injuries.
The impact of these suicides is impossible to measure, and there is
scant evidence that the officials responsible for the land
expropriations in these cases have been punished.
One of China’s leading newspapers, Southern Weekend, analyzed eight cases
from 2008 to 2010 and found that in all instances the officials
responsible were still in their posts. Certainly, the deaths continue
today. The most recent self-immolation was of Hu Tengping of Zhoukeng, a
village in Jiangxi Province.
Mr. Hu, who worked as a migrant laborer in Changsha, returned home for
the Chinese New Year this year to find that his home had been torn down
for an undisclosed development. Later that same day he went to the
Communist Party offices and set himself on fire. According to relatives,
the family was never able to recover Mr. Hu’s corpse.
“There is no one helping us,” said Mr. Hu’s sister, who asked that her
name not be used for fear of retaliation. “There’s no justice in the
world. There’s no law.”
After Suicides, Some Changes
A national activist who tracks unrest, Huang Qi, said cases like Mr.
Hu’s and Ms. Tang’s have spurred the government’s recent crackdown on
corruption and forced it to rethink the idea that fast urbanization is
the best way to stimulate economic growth. In Chengdu, at least, the
party secretary behind the city’s ambitious urbanization drive, Li
Chuncheng, was toppled last year, a move that Mr. Huang said was partly caused by unease over the methods used to take land.
Political analysts in Beijing also say that economic reforms that could
be unveiled in November would increase compensation for expropriated
rural land, while other measures could give farmers more rights to
determine how their land is used. Currently, all land is owned by the
government, and farmers have only usage rights.
“Li Chuncheng’s problem is mainly due to the efforts of the Chengdu
people,” Mr. Huang said. “There have been more protests against land
expropriation in this one city than in many provinces. The cases were
terrible, but I think they had an effect.”
Tang Huiqing thinks so, too.
“My sister’s sacrifice brought a change,” she said. “Right now they
don’t dare tear down so many homes. There’s more consultation. At least
here, they don’t tear down as much. Maybe in this village it’s better.”
The effect on her family, however, was grim. The sisters’ mother joined
the Communist Party shortly after it took power in 1949, elated at its
promise to take land from landlords and redistribute it to poor peasants
like the Tang family. Her daughter’s death broke her will to live, and
she died a few months later.
“She was heartbroken,” Ms. Tang said. “She couldn’t understand how they
could act like this to unarmed, ordinary people.”
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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