China's land disputes at crisis point as revolutionary turmoil beckons, says professor of disenfranchised

John Garnaut March 1, 2010

The Australian ambassador could not have had any idea about the fuss he caused by simply asking through proper official channels to see a respected Chinese scholar.
But Yu Jianrong is not just any scholar. He may know more about China's street-side social and political realities than anyone on the planet.
It was March 2008, the month of the Tibet riots, and only weeks before the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, had delivered his famous human rights speech at Peking University.
Professor Yu's employer, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, sought advice from the Department of Propaganda, which called a crisis meeting.
"Our [Academy] got very nervous, because in normal circumstances an ambassador would not make a visit," said Professor Yu, telling part of the story in a December 26 speech to the Beijing Lawyers Association, the text of which has recently surfaced on Chinese language websites.
"So the work unit made a preplan, like you lawyers having meetings and organising people to guess possible questions and how I should answer," he said.
Professor Yu was gently poking fun at how China's bureaucracy orders its priorities. The bureaucratic straitjacket does not seem to suit him.
Not long before Geoff Raby's request, Professor Yu had dressed up as a downtrodden peasant and lived for weeks in Beijing's "petitioners village", to find out why these aggrieved citizens persisted in futile quests for justice.
He somehow manages to straddle the enormous distance between the disenfranchised bottom of Chinese society and the political elite. When not mixing with peasants and workers who are appealing for justice, he interviews officials, caucuses with ministers and travels with top leaders in their VIP jets on inspection tours.
Professor Yu's uniquely valuable research and analysis provides him with an unusual degree of political protection, although he sensibly declines to test it by talking with foreign journalists.
Another well-known Chinese scholar said Professor Yu had recently been given a very large research grant from the Propaganda Department to find out what was really going on with mass unrest around the country "because they actually needed to find a real scholar to find out these things".
Back in 2008, Dr Raby's question was sufficiently well-aimed to get through the defences of China's most influential think tank, the world's most formidable propaganda apparatus and even Professor Yu.
"Finally he came but didn't ask any questions we thought of," Professor Yu told the Beijing lawyers.
"He asked three questions, one of which was: 'In 2007 Chinese peasants in three regions made declarations of private land ownership. What happens if one day all Chinese peasants do?' I felt dizzy at that moment because that question wasn't on our preplan. I told him, according to our investigations, more than 90 per cent of Chinese farmers don't yet have such conceptions."
Dr Raby was asking about declarations of individual land ownership that had materialised in December 2007 in Heilongjiang, Shaanxi and Tianjin. I had visited one of those disputes, in Heilongjiang up near the Russian border, and it was about as serious as a land dispute can get before calling it a war.
That pre-Olympics revolutionary excitement has subsided but it has not gone away. Private land ownership in the countryside continues to be outlawed under the Chinese constitution - a kind of bottom line that allows the Communist Party to at least argue a commitment to socialism - but the subject is at the centre of raging political, economic and social policy debates.
Poor peasants do not have secure title to trade and mortgage their land efficiently. Land is often the only asset they have, and yet officials and their cronies are, in effect, stealing it and flipping it to developers at enormous mark-ups, while keeping the difference as government revenue or private "grey'' income.
Cheap, stolen land is fueling an ever-growing construction and industrial production boom. Last year local governments received 22 per cent of their total revenue from land sales, says a UBS economist, Wang Tao. Other economists are warning of local government and banking system ruin when the system goes belly up.
Nevertheless, despite the central government's strident warnings and feeble interventions, the problem of officials stealing peasant land is reaching ever-greater heights.
"Since June 2004, land disputes have become the critical problem of rural China," said Professor Yu, referring to the year when the central government abolished agricultural taxes and set local officials off in pursuit of a replacement revenue stream.
"For tax protests, farmers directed their accusations to the county and township governments. But for land disputes they accuse city, provincial or even central governments," he said. "Most importantly, the number of large scale mass riots is growing."
And gangsters are now shouldering the dirty work.
"Today, more than 90 per cent of land disputes have a black society background," Professor Yu said.
He believes the situation is reaching crisis point.
"When conflict deepens, social pressure builds and everybody feels there is no way out, all social forces start looking for a bottom line," Professor Yu said. "Otherwise, there will be greater social turmoil and it will destroy all social order.
"There are two basic choices. First, the fear of these disastrous consequences will lead the various interest groups towards rational compromise, a reasonable bottom line that is acceptable to all. Second, in the absence of such compromise, fundamental and revolutionary turmoil may take place."
What does the first, "rational compromise'', choice involve? It is also revolutionary: subordinate the Communist Party to the nation's laws.
"Let's forget all about ideology, don't look back at Mao's period, or talk about Deng's era, and just safeguard our constitution,'' Professor Yu said. ''There is nothing to safeguard now in Chinese society; again and again we retreat in defeat. Can we safeguard our final bottom line?"

http://www.smh.com.au/business/chinas-land-disputes-at-crisis-point-as-revolutionary-turmoil-beckons-says-professor-of-disenfranchised-20100228-pb4n.html