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...bloodless military coup. Thousands of jubilant Thais greeted him at the airport. The former PM faces charges of corruption and abuse of power, which he has denied. But the court cases matter little to Thaksin's many supporters. Even though he has vowed to stay away from politics, a local polling center found that Thaksin is still Thailand's most popular politician. "Everyone says, 'Oh, half of Thailand hates Thaksin,'" says Soonthon Prueksapipat, a website employee who went to the Bangkok airport to welcome the ex-PM. "But all the leaders before had people who hated them. Thaksin...
...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...
...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...
...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...