About 1,000 farmers gathered in the village meeting hall at Changchunling at 8 am on Dec 19, 2007 and proclaimed what amounted to a revolt against China’s Communist land-ownership system.
The broad, flat fields surrounding Changchunling belong to the farmers who work them, they declared, and not to the local government. The farmers then began dividing up the village's collective holdings, with the goal of making each family the owner of a private plot.
The redistribution exercise at Changchunling marked what appears to be the start of a backlash against China’s system of collective land ownership in rural areas.
The uprising began in Changchunling in the frigid, snow-covered soybean fields, close to the Russian border. In a few weeks, it had spread to half a dozen other areas around the country, raising fundamental ideological questions for a government that still describes itself as Marxist-Leninist after 30 years of economic reforms.
The farmers focused on 2,50,000 acres that had been taken over by local officials in the 1990s for sale to private agriculture companies. Only part of the land was — in theory — redistributed last month, they said, because police moved in and prevented further allocations. But the farmers have since moved beyond the issue of the seized land and asserted the right to own all the collective farmland that they currently work under lease.
The nascent movement, although tiny within a peasant population of 700 million, has confronted the Chinese Communist Party with a difficult challenge: If the experience of the past 30 years has shown the wisdom of privatising state-owned industry and moving toward a market economy, why would it not be wise to privatise the land and bring it into the market economy, as well?
That is not the kind of issue the party wanted to address as China enters a period of intense international scrutiny leading up to the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer. Its initial reaction has been to dismiss the whole idea, saying history shows that peasants were exploited by private landlords before the Communist takeover in 1949.
During China’s civil war, Mao Zedong’s forces gathered millions of peasants to support his movement against the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek on the strength of promises to rid the country of hated private landlords and give the land to those who farmed it.
In Changchunling, dozens of police officers burst in and tried to break up the Dec 19 meeting half an hour after it began, farmers recalled.
Farmers have not just exploded in anger, but have taken on the system that gives officials their power over the land. Moreover, they have coordinated with other farmers via the internet and sought tactical advice from democracy advocates in Beijing who see an opportunity to advance their political agenda.
The activist, who discussed his work on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that he had written the communique issued by the farmers and influenced their decision to declare private ownership of their land. In the declaration, he sought to turn the Communist Party’s historical recrimination against landlords on its head, saying that local officials abuse farmers in the same way as landlords did before 1949.
The Washington Post
