A month after the southern Chinese village of Wukan rose up in open rebellion against the local Communist Party leadership over land grabs, Premier Wen Jiabao has assured farmers their rights would be protected as Beijing looks to address rising rural unrest ahead of a crucial leadership transition.
Mr. Wen, touring southern Guangdong province, where Wukan is located, told farmers at a village that “arbitrary seizure” of farmland was triggering mass protests, in a rare acknowledgment from a top government official of the driving force behind the tens of thousands of such cases reported every year.
“What is the widespread problem now? It is the arbitrary seizure of farmers' fields, and the farmers have complaints about this,” he said, in remarks reported by the official Xinhua news agency. “It is even sparking mass incidents.”
The root of the problem, he added, was farmers' rights were not being protected. He warned that reforms needed to be continued “or there will only be a dead end” in an unusually strong language.
His comments come as tens of thousands of villages begin local-level elections to choose representatives. Chinese citizens are allowed to vote for representatives in direct elections only in the village level — the lowest level of government administration. Elections are, however, widely seen as being controlled by local party branches, with independent candidates rarely meeting with success.
Elected village committees hold power to take decisions to sell farmers' land, which is collectively owned by the village and leased out to farmers.
Close ties between real estate developers and local authorities often result in farmers having little say in land deals, sparking unrest, as was the case in Wukan.
Mr. Wen stressed “the need to ensure farmers' voting rights” as well as “the direct election of village-level leadership”.
“Self-governance”, he said, was “the only appropriate way for improving rural community administration” and to ensure that “local affairs should be decided by local villagers”.
He called for a “strict legal system” and to regulate elections, but did not specify how this would be done or what measures would be put in place, when thousands of villages will vote.
Last week, Wukan's villagers, for the first time in years, had an open election to choose their election committees. Electoral contests had been stage-managed by party-backed officials for decades, before the local-leadership was finally thrown out by protesting farmers, who were subsequently given backing by the provincial government.
But whether Wukan remains an exception or a model is unclear, though the central government in Beijing has in its first policy document for 2012 — the year that sees a once-in-a-decade sweeping leadership transition across all levels of government — pledged to revise rural land laws.
