Land grabs in China major cause of social unrest

China: The land seizures that have provoked a week-long stand-off between authorities and villagers in southern China have become one of the country's most volatile social problems.

Thousands of residents of Wukan village, which is under police blockade, have taken to the streets demanding the government take action over illegal land grabs and the death in custody of a local leader.

It is an issue being repeated across the fast-growing country as officials seeking to cash in on a property and building boom increasingly force farmers off their land to make way for luxury apartments, golf courses and factories.

In many cases, local government officials offer little or no compensation to residents, sparking sometimes violent disputes.

An estimated 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) of land has been expropriated in the past 20 years, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a government think-tank, said last month.

Total compensation paid out was one trillion yuan ($150 billion) below the market price, CASS researcher Yu Jianrong was quoted as saying by the Communist Party mouthpiece, People's Daily. Since the country began economic reforms in 1978 at least 50 million farmers have lost their land, Yu added.

“Some of them became residents of cities, but almost half of them have no jobs and no social insurance, which cause disputes,” Yu said. CASS says land disputes account for 65 percent of rural China's “mass incidents” -- the one-party government's euphemism for large protests.

Lawyers say that official land grabs begun in the late 1990s, as China's economy picked up steam, have been exacerbated by the government's control of all land and local officials' reliance on land to meet development targets.

“It's getting worse, driven by land finance,” Xie Yanyi, a Beijing lawyer who specialises in land rights, told AFP.

A survey of 1,700 households in six provinces published in October found that land disputes have been the top cause of rural clashes with authorities since 2002, according to Outlook Weekly, a magazine run by the official Xinhua news agency.

Reports of grisly land dispute deaths emerge on a regular basis.

Earlier this year, a 38-year-old woman was killed by a digger while protesting against a canal project in the central province of Henan, in front of numerous officials and security guards.

Last December, a village chief in the eastern province of Zhejiang was suspiciously run over and killed by a truck after he had protested for years against a government-backed land grab.

Compensation for people's homes is often a key trigger for land disputes, and new government rules state that the money paid for expropriated homes must not be lower than the market price for similar properties. AFP