Word: landing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...