Subject: Peasants take law into their own hands Fri Dec 28, 2007 5:12 pm
THE road to China's suburban dream is potted with the usual grievances. The bus to town is too crowded, the toll road too expensive, developers too dishonest.
But the young families who were driven by Beijing's sizzling property prices to buy at Grand Jade Garden, on the city's eastern fringe have a more fundamental problem: none of them have legal title to the homes they thought they owned.
"They couldn't bulldoze this place because there are so many of us," says young mother Shi Conglai. But her reassurance is laced with doubt. "Where would we all go?"
"There is nothing good about living here," says a Beijing professional, Tian Xue, who moved her family to the area because she wanted to feel like a Beijing resident but could not afford to buy downtown. "I am very unsatisfied."
The rural land was never authorised for urban development. Not only are their apartments badly built, with promised amenities left unfinished, but they exist in a kind of legal purgatory. Not sufficiently legitimate to support a mortgage but so far, not so illegal that they must be pulled down.
Chinese academics say up to 30 per cent of all new homes in large cities such as Beijing, Hangzhou and Chongqing occupy a similarly hazy legal space. What might seem an obtuse legal question to outsiders has become one of the most pressing socioeconomic problems in China. "Minor property", as it is known, is so widespread, and its challenges so hotly debated and intractable, that some commentators say nothing less than a second land revolution can sort it out.
Millions of minor property owners had presumed their tenure would evolve into full legal title. Such recognition would help the flow of cheap housing to millions of disgruntled urbanites otherwise priced out of the market.
But optimistic home owners underestimated the tangle that is China's land property system - and the vested interests that depend on the status quo. The massively growing informal land market excludes local officials from taking a cut of the profits, along with the powerful developers they work with. One developer, Ren Zhiqiang, says minor property is "stealing" because it bypasses planning approval and land duties - and it all should be torn down.
On June 20 the Ministry of Construction warned that minor property occupiers would have no legal protection if local governments decided to act. Within months apartment compounds were being bulldozed in Shandong, Jinan and other provinces.
The resulting uproar took authorities by surprise, and journalists were ordered to drop the story.
"This uncertainty is politically very dangerous," said David Kelly, a sinologist who is following the debate at the National University of Singapore's East Asia Institute. "A lot of people argue it's simply a matter of social justice to allow minor property to develop."
Villagers at places like Grand Jade Gardens took it upon themselves to complete the rural land reforms started by peasants and then endorsed by Deng Xiaoping nearly 30 years ago. Those reforms restored market incentives by allowing peasants to "contract" to work individual plots of land - leading to the greatest burst of poverty alleviation the world has seen. But rural land remained collectively owned, so local bureaucrats retain the legal right to appropriate, rezone and develop it however they see fit.
Today peasants are brazenly bypassing the bureaucrats and keeping the development profits that local officials would otherwise reserve for themselves. Their cause has received strong backing from policy pundits.
At the Grand Jade Gardens sales office, a peasant-cum-property mogul, Li Shiqi, explains how his Zhangjiawan village management committee got around the constitutional prohibition against peasants selling their land. Their village "renewal" project created new apartments for the 2000 residents - and also happened to produce a bonus gated compound with pseudo-Roman facades and 207 multi-storey villas and flats, which they sold.
Li's fellow villagers seem comfortable that they got a good deal. Wang, a retired army officer, traded his share in the collective village land for a new apartment with subsidised hot water and a monthly pension of nearly 400 yuan ($63).
Villagers also get a "grain-growing compensation payment" and many of them have jobs running the new compound, where they were previously peddling bicycle rickshaws. Wang says the village has finally overcome the ubiquitous rural Chinese problem of "too many people, too little land".
China's leaders stopped the bulldozers after witnessing the hostile public reaction. But a fortnight ago they also proclaimed that minor property cannot be bought or sold. It is a Mexican stand-off, with the Government unable to deprive minor property owners of their homes and yet unwilling to retrospectively legitimise their ownership rights.
Some residents say they regret paying upfront (at discount prices) to "own" nothing more than the right to live in their flats until officials change their mind.
"When we bought last year nobody was having this discussion," says Shi, at Grand Jade Gardens. "We did not know there was a problem with land title."
Li, at the sales office, maintains that his buyers are safe to sell or lease their homes however they please. He believes the biggest minor property developments will survive the coming battle. "Nobody has told us that this is illegal," says Li. "And this development is too big to bulldoze." Link _________________ Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis,OZschwitz Contraband “The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner "Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann
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Subject: Re: Peasants take law into their own hands Fri Dec 28, 2007 6:30 pm
The peasants are revolting! _________________ Anarcho Capitalists Retail , OZschwitz Downunder BoutiqueAnarcho-Capitalists,AnCaps Forum,Anti-State,Anti-Statist,Inalienable Rights Defenders,Non-Aggression Principle,Non-Initiation of Force Principle,Rothbardians,Anarchist,Capitalist,objectivism,Ayn Rand,Anarcho-Capitalism,Anarcho-Capitalist,politics,libertarianism,Ancap Forum,Anarchist Forum,Vulgar Libertarians,Hippies of The Right,Forum for Anarcho-Capitalist,Forum for Anarcho-Capitalists,Forum for AnCap,Forum for AnCaps,Libertarian,Anarcho-Objectivist,Freedom, Laissez Faire, Free Trade, Black Market, Randroid, Randroids, Rothbardian, AynArchist, Anarcho-Capitalist Forum, Anarchism, Anarchy, Free Market Anarchism, Free Market Anarchy, Market Anarchy
Subject: Peasants take law into their own hands 
Fri Dec 28, 2007 5:12 pm
