Over the last several years, local regime officials have been assiduously engaged in a creative manipulation of both: confiscating land from farmers in the less densely populated rural areas, while convincing them that it’s time for the “high life”: life in a modern, high-rise apartment complex with all the amenities. Just like in the large, congested cities of China.
Zhou Wenhui didn’t know what he would lose in the move “up”: He now stands as a statistic in the regime’s widespread rural relocation campaign titled “moving the farmer upstairs.” A year ago, the farmer from a village in Jiangsu Province proudly called home to a house, a yard, and a few acres of land. He and his family grew vegetables and raised poultry, which was an additional source of income and a pleasant way to bond with family members and other farmers.
But officials moved to expropriate the property, uprooting the Zhou family and putting them in a multi-storied apartment building. The family now has to pay a property management fee of more than 200 yuan (approximately US$30) each month and other previously unincurred expenses. There is no yard for growing vegetables, and they will no longer hear the lazy clucks of chickens.
Before claiming the land and living accommodations from Zhou and other villagers, local government officials reassured them that the move would improve their quality of life, something one would be foolish to turn down. “But our lives have not improved,” Zhou told New Epoch Weekly. “It’s not nearly as good as before.”
Profitability in Land Exploitation
Zhou’s village is only one of many in China whose families are being upturned from their bucolic surroundings and precious land, to be transplanted into the world of vertical apartment living, without land privileges. The campaign of “moving the farmer upstairs,” with its literal upward mobility and implied status, has in the past few years affected 26 provinces and cities across the country. While local governments boast of reinventing rural spaces, the interminable construction projects are fueled by the regime’s insatiable drive to satisfy ambitious land quotas in urban areas.
A 2006 Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) regulation stipulates that urban construction areas can be expanded if more farmlands are created in a district’s rural areas. While the sale of land has become a rapid and major source of income for many local governments, officials were quick to realize that stacking agrarian families in apartment complexes was an expeditious way to generate more farmland.
According to Southern Weekly, one city’s top official bragged to a central government rural work team that his local government would make 700 billion yuan in the next three to five years, simply by moving a million local farmers into apartment buildings.
“The one million farmers are residing on at least one million acres land. If they are all moved into apartments, it will free up at least 0.7 million acres. If an acre sells at one million yuan (US$150,033,) it’ll add up to 700 billion yuan (US$105.0231 billion.) What can’t be done with 700 billion?” he boasted.
Farmers Frustrated
While the campaign has promised to improve quality of life for farmers, the enticements are rejected by a Shandong farmer, armed with simple math calculations.
“They expropriated our high quality houses at 160 to 550 yuan (US$24 to US$86) per square meter, and then made us buy apartments at 800 to 1,000 yuan (US$120 to US$150) per square meter,” the Shaozhuangsi village farmer told New Epoch Weekly. “Now we are neck-deep in debt. Is this improvement or deterioration for our lives?”
A Shandong Province farmer named Xu told New Epoch Weekly that the villagers don’t even have a place in the new apartment buildings to dry their newly harvested peanuts.
“Every household had a cellar in the yard to store apples, since apples are a major product of our region,” he said. “Where do we store the apples now?” That they could no longer keep livestock or grow vegetables saddened him deeply, he said.
The additional expenses for energy and water arising from apartment dwelling has been an additional financial burden. A farmer named Fan told New Epoch Weekly that some villagers sleep between two electric blankets in order not to consume natural gas. He said that others have even resorted to the risky practice of making a hole in the apartment wall to use coal stoves to heat the room.
Those who have been provided with an apartment to move into are among the privileged few. Most farmers whose property was expropriated are still waiting to be settled. Jiangsu farmer Gu Rongmei told New Epoch Weekly that the expropriation and demolition began in 2007, but now the promised new apartments are still not available.
“They gave us only five yuan (US$0.75) per acre per month as a transition fee,” Gu said. “Some villagers are still living in tents.”
Similar scenarios have taken place in Anhui Province’s Fengyang County, with more tragic consequences. Local residents said that of eleven farmers over 60 years old who had lived in tents after their houses were demolished in 2008, ten died from cold or sickness, while the eleventh hanged himself in despair.
In Jining City of Shandong Province, over 10 thousand houses of more than 500,000 farmers were demolished over the past year, leaving the majority of the inhabitants displaced and living in tents.
Farmer Dai is from a Chongqing suburban village. He told New Epoch Weekly of how the escalating exploitation of land is frustrating farmers everywhere: farmers deprived of their land have hardly any means to support themselves.
His village had been prospering with mushroom farming, a profitable business that every household relied on for income. Now that the entire village has been moved into apartment buildings, they have no place to plant mushrooms.
“Now we have nothing to do, and spend every day playing poker and Mahjong,” Dai said. “A villager once told an official that we’d end up stealing in no more than two years.” The local government’s promises of a better life had all been lies, he said.
No Change
Faced with popular mounting indignation and media criticism, the regime admitted to problems over the land exchange policy. In a discussion session in August on urban rural integration in Haikou, China, central Party official Chen Xiwen said it was “unprecedented in world history” to rearrange villages on a large scale during peaceful times.
He said, “The nature of the ‘moving farmer upstairs’ campaign is to grade rural land for urban uses. The villages have been turned into a big mess.” He cautioned: “If such things are not effectively curbed, something major will happen.”
Chen blamed local governments. The policy of exchanging rural for urban land was initially intended to be an experiment meant only to affect a few regions, but the policy has been abused by government entities at the local level, he said.
State media reports indicated that the land exchange policy will remain as stands.
The original Chinese article was published in New Epoch Weekly, a weekly full-color magazine printed by The Epoch Times in Chinese.
