Chinese villagers driven off land fear food may run out

Chinese villagers driven off land fear food may run out

www.guardian.co.uk

In one shaky mobile phone video, dozens of farmers armed with shovels lash out at people off camera. In another, an angry mob batters a corrugated iron fence round a development site. Further clips show a man lying injured on the ground and people shouting: "Call an ambulance."

Images of the violent conflicts in the village of Xujiancheng in Hebei province earlier this year were given to the Guardian last week by residents who want to draw the Chinese government's attention to what they say is a fight for their legal rights and the nation's food security.

The villagers are involved i

(visit the link for the full news article)

Video link:

Sorry cant embed the vid as it is not YT of GGGle.

video on guardian website also available in article linked above

Propaganda officials at Baigou township, which oversees this area about two hours' drive from Beijing, and a local development office either declined to respond to these accusations or said they were unaware of any conflict.

Stories of forced evictions and bloody protests in rural China have been commonplace in recent years as cities sprawl outwards and more land is needed for industrial parks, housing blocks, roads and railways.

Many farmers believe local officials are in cahoots with developers to cheat them of fair compensation and a share of the surge in the land's value when it is recategorised for commercial use. This is a common complaint among the protesters in Xujiancheng, who have smashed the windows in the developer's office, torn down walls erected round their requisitioned farmland and spread protest banners across fences near the building site. In the fiercest protests in January, they carried two empty coffins to the frontline to show their willingness to die.

The actions of the developer are disgusting.

It does however raise a couple of deeper issues for me:

1. There is corruption at every level of authority all over the world - human beings really are reprehensible! Is everybody and anybody ready to drop on the 'little' man for personal gain?

2. China is so big in terms of population, when does it become impossible to realistically govern by the traditional methods of rule? 2 billion? 3 billion? We often hear about global overpopulation in terms of lack of resources which is what these laws that are being broken by the developers are geared towards. They are intended to protect farmland because that equals food to feed the population. The responses from the government agencies that the Guardian spoke to chose not to respond to the allegations and the protesters we see here could be a small sample of an enormous problem across the country. If the government officials are complicit in such scams and the theft of land, how does it become possible for central government to effectively govern the population? I have not considered this aspect before and am interested to hear peoples views of where a realistic stress level falls for central government to fail in terms of population - if there is one. Ultimately it would, of course, be a combination of over population and lack of resources that caused any fundamental breakdown in society, however could population volume alone cause central government to fail?

www.guardian.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Originally posted by spacedonk

Chinese villagers driven off land fear food may run out

When have the Chinese ever cared for the little guy?

Didn't Mao off about 40 million of his people in the Glorious Workers Revolution?

reply to post by AuranVector


Yes, but that was central government action, not local corruption. In this case (I imagine in large part due to the media restrictions in the country) the villagers feel that the CENTRAL government is unaware of their plight because of the LOCAL governments corruption. It is not new for the Chinese population to suffer, it is probably not new that there is local corruption, it is new for us to hear about the corruption of local government and the exploitation of people who will not cede to their profiteering. This is what got me to thinking about population volume as an indicator of whether this creates a tipping point where the historic central government model becomes neither useful or workable.