Chinese See Communist Land Sales Hurting Mao’s Poor to Pay Rich

By Bloomberg News - Oct 24, 2011

Bulldozers razed Li Liguang’s farmhouse four years ago after officials in the Chinese city of Loudi told him the land was needed for a 30,000-seat stadium.

What Li, 28, says they didn’t tell him is that he would be paid a fraction of what his plot was worth and get stuck living in a cinder-block home, looking on as officials do what he never could: Grow rich off his family’s land.

It’s a reversal of one of the core principles of the Communist Revolution. Mao Zedong won the hearts of the masses by redistributing land from rich landlords to penniless peasants. Now, powerful local officials are snatching it back, sometimes violently, to make way for luxury apartment blocks, malls and sports complexes in a debt-fueled building binge.

City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.

“The high price of land leads to local governments being predatory,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai who was formerly Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist. “China’s land policy is really screwed up.”

The evictions are alarming the nation’s leaders, who have taken steps to tackle the problem and are concerned about social stability. Land disputes are the leading cause of surging unrest across China, according to an official study published in June. The number of so-called mass incidents -- prοtests, riots, strikes and other disturbances -- doubled in five years to almost 500 a day in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.



Read the whole article at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-2 ... -rich.html

That's if it's not blocked by the GFW. (I'm using a VPN.)

It is truly insane. And yet is just keeps rolling on.

Five or six years from now, crisis point.

It sounds as though the leaders are sending one message in their talk but not taking sufficient action to "make it so". Where's Captain Picard when we need him?

I live in SongJiang New Town. Ten years ago when I came here the first time, all of New Town and almost all of University town was farmland. So what happened to all the farmers? Some of them, perhaps only in more recent years, were provided with apartments in the new buildings built on their land. That seems alright until you realize a few things.

First, when they had a farm house they had a 2 or 3 story house with lots of living space a yard, and of course farmland. Now they have 80 or 90 square meters.

Second, the 80 or 90 square meter flats are Chinese flats, thus they come as hollow concrete caves with no flooring, paint on the walls etc. Not very nice places to live. You can pick them out on the tall buildings if you have a keen eye. They are usually on the first couple of floors. They have no air-conditioners mounted outside the windows. And the windows are usually covered in newspaper to block out the sun.

Third, they were farmers, and still are if they can help it. There's nothing these people can do other than farm. No farming = no food. So you'll see these former land owners farming abandoned lots, unused land around the expressways, areas next to side walks that haven't been planted with trees yet. Basically wherever they can put their seeds in the ground, which of course, is less than ideal.

Fourth, if they are lucky enough to grow enough crops to have some to spare to sell (how else are they going to get money besides scavenging for bottles and other recyclables, which they often do), there is no place for them to sell them. So they take their trikes and crowd around the entrances to the highrises they now live in and sell their surplus to their neighbors. That works well until the urban management officials show up looking to crack heads open.

^^That's the real face of China's development. Formerly empowered peasants reduced to scavengers and farmers of waste land scurrying about like rats hiding from probably the only reps of the government they ever see these days, trying to get enough money so they don't starve to death or freeze during the winter in their concrete caves. They must have Mao nailed to the slab he rests on or he surely would have rolled away by now.

Thing is these land developers also borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to fund the projects, and now that they can't sell their properties, they borrow more money from the government to just pay the taxes/interest they owe. They are in the same boat as the government and they know it too; they die, so will the guys that lent them the capital. A pig eating its own hind leg.