Freedom of Residence and Movement
According to an article appearing in the Beijing News, the Henan Provincial Conference on Rural Affairs has decided to lift mandatory corveé labor requirements on rural residents. The measure accompanies other efforts to improve the rights of migrant workers, including directives aimed at protecting their rural property rights and barring discrimination against them. These positive developments are consistent with recent central government efforts to improve the treatment of migrants. The continued existence of corveé labor, however, shows the extent to which basic personal liberties are often absent in rural China.
On December 30, Southern Weekend published a lengthy review of China’s land crisis and the development of land policy in 2004. According to the article, while the State Council decided to make land policy a priority early in the year, it instituted particularly stringent measures, including a ban on most new land transfers, in April after uncovering several egregious cases of illegal land transfers. According to the article, the State Council’s priorities during the six month ban on land transfers were to (1) conduct an inspection campaign to root out land abuses; (2) reform the land management system at the provincial level and below; and (3) devise a permanent regulation to tighten land policy that was eventually issued nine days before the ban expired.
According to an article in the Beijing News, Ministry of Civil Affairs experts and representatives of local residents committees criticized draft amendments to the Organic Law of Residents Committees at a recent hearing. Residents committees constitute the lowest level of urban government in China and; their members are elected in proceedings often subject to official control and manipulation.
Chinese government agencies often use hearings such as the one described in the article to elicit comments on possible changes in policy or law. Those participating in this particular hearing criticized such official practices as assigning key government responsibilities to residents committees and paying salaries to committee members. The critics pointed out that such practices undermine the independence of the committees, frequently reducing them to administrative tools of the Party and state.
According to a report posted on the China Court Net, the Ministry of Land and Resources and the Ministry of Agriculture announced that they will conduct inspections of arable land protection work in ten provinces in the next few months. The inspections are a continuation of a campaign to tighten land management that was launched eight months ago. The announcement comes on the heels of a State Council videoconference meeting on land management held last week. According to a Xinhua report on the meeting, China lost almost 17 million acres of arable land between 1996 and 2003.
According to articles in the Beijing News and the Legal Daily, the Ministries of Justice and Construction have issued a joint notice instructing legal aid offices to step up their efforts to provide assistance to migrant workers who seek payment of back wages.
Various Chinese domestic media (1, 2) report that the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Finance Ministry, and the People’s Bank have issued a joint notice designed to crack down on abuses in the payment of fees for land used in construction and to prevent local governments from offering essentially free land in order to attract investment. According to an MLR spokesperson, China’s recent land rectification campaign revealed that the failure to pay land use fees and the unlawful diversion of land use fees are "serious" problems in a majority of locales.
The notice, entitled Notice on Management of the Collection and Use of Land Use Fees Owed on Land Used for New Construction, appears to contain several tough new provisions.
In an extensive front-page report, the New York Times (registration required) tells the story of farmers in Sanchawan, Shaanxi as they protested the seizure of their land by the nearby city of Yulin. The Sanchawan dispute erupted into a violent confrontation between farmers and police in early October. Although the piece does not provide significant new insights, it is a useful review of major land requisition and related access to justice issues and an interesting account of the Sanchawan affair. The report is accompanied by a shorter inset on rural property rights in China.
In a recent report, a domestic Chinese Web site described the absurd obstacles that a group of seven Shenyang farmers have faced over the past two years in challenging the compensation paid to them when they were evicted from their farms to make way for urban construction. After being bounced back and forth among provincial and national-level bureaus without any result, the farmers finally decided to sue the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) in August of this year (see related story here).
According to the China Daily and China Youth Daily , the Chinese government may reduce or abolish the agricultural tax in 2005, well before the 2009 deadline that authorities originally set to eliminate it.
Chinese farmers have attacked the highly regressive, seven percent agricultural tax repeatedly, because it reduces both their incomes and the competitiveness of their produce in national and international markets. Unlike urban residents, farmers pay taxes on the total value of their produce, with no allowance or setoff for production costs. Farmers also frequently complain about corruption and excessive tax collection.
According to a December 2 report in the Beijing News, the city of Beijing has already exceeded planning targets for land used in construction and will conduct a major overhaul of its land use plan to make it “more suitable for the needs of the capital’s social development.” Beijing officials claim that the current land use plan, adopted in 1999, was based on inaccurate numbers generated from surveys in the mid-1990s and did not adequately predict the amount of land that would be needed for construction. The announcement seems to run counter to the spirit of a State Council land management circular released in October, which called for stricter land management and efforts to reduce the amount of arable land used for urban construction (see related story here).