Draft law seeks to ease land disputes (2)

Dang Guoying, a researcher with the Rural Development Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), told the Global Times that the regulation and changes to the law will help protect farmland, improve urbanization and the rural economy, and ease disputes. Land disputes and protests have become a major factor behind unrest in rural areas, said Jiang.

The Wukan protest in Shanwei, Guangdong Province in September 2011 was one of the biggest farmer protests caused by land disputes and official corruption. For years, village officials had been secretly selling farmland to developers without notifying farmers.

"An increase in compensation will definitely ease the wealth gap between urban and rural areas and improve the living conditions of farmers, but it will be meaningless if the expropriation process is not transparent," said Wukan villager Zhang Jianxing, who was one of the protest leaders.

Some 6,000 mu of land had been illegally expropriated in the village since the 1990s, Zhang said, and after years of protests, 4,000 mu of land was returned to the villagers. Around 7,000 villagers received 550 yuan in compensation per person for part of the expropriated land, which only accounted for a small fraction of the price at which it was sold to developers, he said.

"I'm worried that it'll still be deals between the government and developers," Zhang said.

More changes should be made to the law to ease disputes, suggested Jiang, who said land should be expropriated only when it is used for public interest projects, such as subway and expressway construction.

"I'm more concerned about who will decide on the compensation standard. Forced expropriation and demolitions will happen again if farmers don't get to negotiate," Yu Jianrong, another CASS rural expert, said in a Weibo Q&A online exchange yesterday.

"Farmers should have the right to bargain and say no to land expropriation, and this right can't be taken away because of some official compensation standard," Yu said.

"The regulations don't stipulate penalties, and for cases involving infringement of farmers' rights, it's better to have a law rather than a regulation which can easily be violated when driven by profits," Beijing-based lawyer Zhu Xiaoding told the Global Times.

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