The Bitter Earth

The farmers of Zhuhai village knew they were courting trouble. With the help of a Beijing lawyer discovered through the Internet, they filed a suit against local authorities to try to stop what they said was the illegal expropriation of their land for a tourism complex. Sure enough, as the case dragged through the courts over the past year, the remaining residents of what was once a picturesque village set amid the bamboo-forested hills of Jiangsu province about 125 miles (200 km) west of Shanghai say they were subject to intimidation ranging from officials pressuring their employers to downright murder threats. One stubborn farmer was sent a text message last June that concluded: "Your life hangs by a thread. If you don't come around immediately. I will make sure you get run over by a car!"

Many of the 250 households gave up and left. But the 15 or so holdout families were still unprepared for the appearance of a hundred or more police and demolition workers in hard hats on Dec. 12. They were bundled out of their homes and those who resisted were beaten with clubs and iron bars. Then, as they watched from a nearby hilltop, demolition backhoes clanked up and began attacking the walls of their houses like huge, mechanized woodpeckers. By the end of the day, nothing but rubble remained. "They beat me all over," says a 52-year-old farmer whose voice is still shaky weeks later. He rolls up a leg of his pants to show a three-inch gash on his calf. "They didn't give us a chance to take anything. Not even a pair of chopsticks. Now my wife and I are sleeping on a table in an old folks' home and begging for meals. We have nothing. No land, no house, no money."

Such violent confrontations are increasingly common in China, where decades of frantic growth have generated an equally frantic desire to cash in by developers, often aided or partnered by corrupt local government officials. But the Zhuhai case is different in one critical respect: after their claims were twice denied by the courts, the villagers issued a proclamation rejecting the land seizures as illegal and asserting their rights over ancestral plots for them and succeeding generations — rights they said they were prepared to "defend to the death." (Officials of Yicheng, the county seat with jurisdiction over Zhuhai, did not respond to a request by TIME for comment on the case.)

China's farmers can work their land through 30-year, renewable leases, but they cannot buy or sell it (all land belongs to the state). Regulations do exist governing expropriation, but they are often not followed. Many farmers are increasingly angry with this — particularly when they believe that the land their families have tilled, often for generations, has been taken away without regard for the law. The declaration by the Zhuhai villagers is the latest in a series of such actions that now involve tens of thousands of farmers all over China. While it is too early to describe this as an organized national movement, there's little doubt that such manifestos — which often use similar vocabulary and phrasing — are part of a new effort by activists and farmers to focus the government's attention on the country's 700 million peasants and the restricted claim they have on the land they work. "This is just the beginning," says a Beijing-based rural-rights activist who says he is one of the main organizers behind the drive to give farmers full legal ownership of their land. "You'll see [many] declarations like these coming out before the Olympics."

Yu Jianrong, a director of the Institute of Rural Development at Beijing's most prestigious think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, or CASS, acknowledges that the recent assertions of rights over land by peasants are potentially transformational. "They're not widespread now but they could become symbolic ... of peasants ceasing to depend on the law and instead depending on 'natural law.'" Journalist and author Chen Guidi is more blunt: "If word of these declarations starts to spread to peasants around the countryside, it could become uncontrollable." Chen, with his wife Wu Chuntao, is the author of Will the Boat Sink the Water? — a widely praised investigation into conditions in rural China. (The book is banned in China.)

The Communist Party is aware of the farmers' anger but seems limited in what it can do. Yu of CASS notes that although there is "widespread recognition in both political and academic circles that the existing rural land system faces extremely grave problems, an extremely large gap also exists over the nature of the problem and how to solve it." Given that the party rose to power as an agrarian movement, conservative forces are blocking attempts to grant private ownership of farmland, which they believe would destroy one of the party's most fundamental socialist tenets. The answer, say Yu and some other academics and lawyers, is gradual reform that gives farmers more control over their land and cracks down on corruption and illegal land seizure. But with local governments earning as much as half of their income from land sales by some calculations, resistance is fierce.

Even when the authorities do act, stiff opposition from local representatives usually succeeds in frustrating those efforts. In Anhui province, for example, officials issued a rule that any project involving the expropriation of more than 20 mu (about three acres or 1.3 hectares) had to be approved by the provincial authorities. But, as Chen notes, in 10 years since its implementation the law hasn't been enforced once. "The central government has issued lots of good policies," Chen says, "but the local governments need help to implement them." That's why he and others such as the rural activist (who asked not to be identified for his protection) say that only by granting full rights to peasants to buy and sell land will these problems be solved from the grass roots up. "I believe if the farmers are given land and freedom to migrate, the change in China would be unrecognizable. A small number of farmers would sell their land once they own it, but the majority of farmers would use their land wisely. The experts should stop worrying and learn to trust the farmers."

Back in a dank, freezing room in Yicheng city, the displaced residents of Zhuhai village are lining up to tell their stories. Some tell of being beaten. One man recounts how he was detained four times — once for 15 days — in a vain attempt to get him to sign a document giving approval for the demolition. They are afraid but also determined to continue fighting until they win their land back. "All we want is the land we have farmed for hundreds of years," says He Fuwei, one of two brothers who signed the original declaration.

In a forthcoming paper in the China Quarterly, Professor Kevin O'Brien of the University of California, Berkeley, describes how repression can often backfire and actually make activists more respected by their communities. If that happened in China, its rural population could be further radicalized. It was Mao Zedong who famously said a "single spark can light a prairie fire." Men like He may not know it, but they are holding burning brands in their hands.