At least 100,000 graves were rebuilt during the Spring Festival holiday, accounting for 7.7 percent of those leveled, official statistics from the Zhoukou Civil Affairs Bureau revealed.

The rebuilding of the graves comes as a counterattack after the controversial grave destruction campaign launched by the local government in February last year. In total, the campaign leveled over 2 million graves and reclaimed over 3 million hectares of farmland.

[…] The seesaw battle between the local government and the villagers continues today, highlighting the sensitivity of modern political actions when clashing with long-standing traditions.

[…] Tomb-Sweeping Day, a traditional holiday for honoring ancestors, will take place on April 4. Gong said he and other government officials are facing a lot of pressure as a new wave of grave rebuilding is expected around the day.

To prevent people from rebuilding graves, the local government plans to give out trees to villagers to commemorate Tomb-Sweeping Day. The idea is that villagers will plant the trees at the original spot of their ancestral graves as a marker and commemorate the dead ancestors under the tree

Global Times also recently profiled local official Zhao Keluo, who believes that he was removed from the Henan CPPCC as punishment for his vocal opposition to the tomb removals.

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Post tags: agriculture, death, farmland, Henan, land disputes, land grabs, tombs
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Wan Bentai, the chief engineer for China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, said a survey of soil pollutants this year found heavy metal from smelter chimneys, water run-off and tailings meant “in total about 10 percent of farmland has striking problems of heavy metal levels exceeding (government) limits,” the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported ….

China’s voracious appetite for the metals has turned heavy metal pollution into a source of widespread public worry and occasional protest. Exposure to lead and other heavy metals can damage nerves, reproductive systems and kidneys, among other health complications, especially among children ….

China is the world’s biggest consumer of refined lead, and battery making accounts for 70 percent of that consumption, which is likely to grow to 4.1 million tons in 2011.

This year has seen a string of factory closures, detentions and suspensions related to lead contamination from battery manufacturing. See also a chinadialogue report on illegal chromium dumping and Paul Mooney’s overview of heavy metal contamination and its human impact, via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: agriculture, battery poisoning, farmland, industrial pollution, lead poisoning, soil contamination
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In February, Caixin, a leading news weekly, quoted soil expert Chen Tongbin, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources (Environmental Remediation Research Centre), as saying 10 per cent of China’s farmland had been contaminated by heavy metals, the leading culprits being cadmium and arsenic ….

Much of the Pearl River Delta has been polluted by heavy metals, according to an investigation conducted by the State Environmental Protection Administration. The study found that 40 per cent of farms and vegetable plots in the region had been polluted by heavy metals ….

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, says weak enforcement means there is a lack of incentive for manufacturers and buyers to act. Experts say companies are reluctant to spend money on advanced pollution-control equipment because that would cut into profits in a competitive environment. And, says Ma, local officials are “still putting gross domestic product ahead of environmental protection and public health”.

Even when polluters are punished, says Ma, “the penalty is not sufficient to really discourage [them]. The cost of violating is still lower than the cost of compliance. So we see some of the factories having problems year after year, just paying [the fines] without solving the problem.”

Ma warns that heavy metals pose a bigger threat than most other pollutants because they don’t decompose naturally, instead becoming more concentrated over time. Furthermore, victims of industrial pollution have limited legal protection.

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Post tags: cadmium batteries, Chinese Academy of Science, factories, farmland, industrial pollution, lead poisoning, Ma Jun
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Such extreme protest reflects a serious systemic problem in China’s governance: Underfunded local governments frequently dilute and undercut implementation of national laws and policies in their effort to sustain growth and increase local revenues. Some examples of the consequences of this practice include not only illegal expropriation of land, but also tolerance of violations of laws on product safety, intellectual property rights (IPR) and protection of the environment. There is a frequent disconnect between local governments and Beijing that is aggravated by the center’s underfunding of local governments.

This gap in Chinese governance could be partially addressed if the central government increased financial transfers to lower levels of government that might serve to reduce the incentives to pursue growth at any costs. In addition, however, local governments must be more closely supervised, both in their use of funds received from Beijing for use in social programs as well as more generally in their enforcement of national laws.

A major area of concern has been the arbitrary expropriation of farmland, often in collusion with private developers, without adequate notice and/or payment of fair compensation. The extent of the problem is illustrated by a nationwide illegal boom in the development of golf courses. In 2004, there were about 170 golf courses in China, and today there are nearly 600—despite the fact that development of new courses has been illegal since 2004. According to a recent report, golf course development was supposed to have been halted in order to preserve farmland and “reduce the huge numbers of villagers thrown off their land as luxury real estate is developed.” An architect of several illegal golf courses said that local governments “were almost always involved” and “were often the main client” for his services.

Law professor Wang Weiguo recently called for reform of land ownership in China, according to Caixin Online:

People’s land use rights, which have been protected by China’s civil law, can still be rescinded at any time by the land owner, the state, Wang noted.

Since half of local governments’ revenue relies on sales of land, they have turn themselves into land suppliers and embarked on massive land requisitions to deliver better GDP performance, said Wang ….

Currently, only local governments have the right to requisition rural land for urban construction, generally with inadequate compensation to farmers.

The land monopoly by the government amounts to nothing more than a campaign to seize the property of the people, said Wang, adding that it is a trespassing of state rights over civil rights.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bomb, farmland, food safety, golf, intellectual property rights, Jiangxi, land compensation, land reform, land rights
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When a leading mainland economist suggested recently that Beijing’s steadfast insistence on keeping a minimum of 120 million hectares of arable land was “a hurdle for China’s further industrialization and urbanization” and should be discarded, it created nothing less than a public furor.

Mao Yushi, founder and chairman of the independent Unirule Institute of Economics, has overnight become “a public enemy”, said the China Times newspaper. His suggestion that China stop pursuing a policy of food self-sufficiency and rely instead on the world grain market for supplies have quickly transformed him into a target for “vehement criticism”.

“Whoever went through the famine during the late 1950s and early 1960s in China knows how important food is,” a netizen going by the name of “sgy123″ said. “It is quite dangerous for 1.3 billion people to rely on imported grain.”… This year marks the 50th anniversary of the famine that left anything between 10 million and more than 30 million people dead during the Great Leap Forward – Mao Zedong’s utopian attempt to make communist China leapfrog the industrialized nations of the West.

See also past CDT posts for farmland and land use.

© cschultz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: farmland, land use, Mao Yushi
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According to an independent investigation, only 59 percent of Chinese villagers received contracts or certificates for land use-rights. This contrasts sharply with the 90 percent figure given by the Ministry of Agriculture.

The investigation, conducted jointly by the U.S. Rural Development Institute, Renmin University, and the Michigan State University, showed that in 17 major agricultural provinces only 47 percent of local villagers had secured certificates.

The lowest rate of certificate holders was in Guizhou Province, where only a little more than 10 percent had papers. The second lowest was in Heilongjiang Province, at less than 20 percent. Sichuan, Henan, Shaanxi, Heilongjiang followed subsequently.

The percent of contract holders was even less, totaling only 33 percent. Guangxi Province had the fewest at less than 10 percent. It was followed by Guizhou Province, with nearly 10 percent, and then Anhui, Yunnan, Fujian, Heilongjiang, Hubei, Shaanxi.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: farmland, land rights
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China urgently needs a new rural land ownership mechanism to guarantee farmers’ legal rights and security, according to a UN-China project inked in Beijing on Dec. 20.

Jointly launched by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Chinese government, the four-year project aims to revitalize rural China by addressing problems of property rights, local governance and the provision of public services.

With initial funding of five million U.S. dollars covering a rural population of 400 million in eight pilot provinces, the project promotes clear, equitable and efficient land acquisition mechanisms, improved local governance, the provision of public goods and services in rural areas and the protection of farmers’ rights and interests.[Full Text]

© Mo Ming for China Digital Times (CDT), 2006. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: farmland, land rights, land use
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