The farmland in Hunan Province

Shuxian Wang sits on the rocker in her new home, humming along to the voice of a pop singer on TV while her two-year old granddaughter crawls on the ground.

For the first time in her life, she lives in an apartment that has three bedrooms, a kitchen that uses natural gases and a toilet where waste is flushed down by water.

Her new apartment is on the fourth floor in a compound southwest of a village called Zhou on the North China Plain. But Wang and many others in her village aren't pleased with the process that brought them their new home.

In 2009, village residents saw cranes working in an enclosed ground in the village. Three years later, residential buildings shot up.

Villagers moved in, their old houses demolished, the land sold to developers. The new compound, officially named Tian Fu Jia Yuan (Paradise and Haven), is no larger than four football courts and accommodates 200 families, each living in a 120-square-meter unit. 

Jia Li’an, the project's developer and a local real estate company, has invested $8.3 millions in developing the 40,000-square-meter compound since 2006. It is one of the largest private real estate dealers in China, owning compounds in the downtown section of a town 20 miles away. 

“Our village committee said the local government built the new compound to improve the living quality of farmers,” said Wang, a farmer’s wife who has never been to place further than the shopping mall of a town nearby. 

As one of the first ten families to move into the new compound, Wang’s family got a $300 incentive. But others are not as supportive of the development as her family.

On Oct. 18, village residents protested before the government office building of the district, asking the government to give their houses back.

Some seniors kneeled down when the chief of the district came out. The banners they held read, “We don’t want to live in the compound.” 

The official that talked with them promised to solve their problems, but residents say they have not heard from any officials since the day of the protest. 

In the past decade, the village committee sold more than half of the farmland owned collectively by residents to a factory owner, a community college and a car exhibition center.

In 2006, when the Communist party secretary of the village told Wang’s family their corn farmland fell into a “development area (a land bought by a community college),” the family chopped off all their corn crops and planted 1,000 trees in the field.

According to compensation laws, developers who buy the land have to pay full-price for the land, all the crops and settlement fees. Developers paid five times more for land with trees than land with corn crops. The family, therefore, got $120,000 in compensation for half an acre of land.

“I thought I made a fortune at that time. With 80,000 RMB, I don’t have to work or worry about any thing,” Wang said. 

Wang soon found out she was wrong. The inflation rate increased 6 percent from 2006 to 2008, making matters worse. Wang’s son had kidney failure and the family lost its fortune. 

Wang said residents who don’t have a fixed income asked for more compensation for moving out of the old houses.

“Now we are neither people living in the city who has a decent job or farmers,” said Xiangjin Meng, an organizer of last week’s protest.

Meng feared that their old houses were sold to the developer under price and the village committee, representing all the residents, took kickbacks. Meng demanded more compensation for moving into the new place.

“An apartment in town now averages $1,000 per square meters, we are not settling on $5,000 for a 300 square meters house,” said Meng. 

The village is one of the 625,000 small villages that suffer from unfair farmland trade, corrupt village officials and a glooming future.

Local officials repeatedly asked village resident to be patient with “a transition from underdeveloped rural area to a modern village.”

The central government seemed to sense the growing anger and worries of the farmers. A few days before the 18th Congress Party, marking the transition of political power, the central government sent instructions to local government officials and police, asking them to "keep an eye on farmers and suppress riots ignited by the seizure of farmland.”  

Chinese domestic media outlets have been muted about riots in the rural area while boasting the “rural area reform, which the Beijing administration said, addresses three key issues 'farmers, village community and agriculture.'”

Local officials received no instruction on pushing forward the transition to a better village community and placing farmers without land and some argue they don't really care about village residents.

In Wang’s village, when the mayor’s election comes in November, candidates knock on doors of every resident, bringing money, coupons and oils. 

“The candidates spend ten of thousands of dollars in the campaign. Why do they want to be the mayor? Of course, they will make the money back by taking kickbacks from developer,” said Wang. 

It is not only Wang, a woman in her mid-fifties, who complained about the land abuse. During the National People’s Congress in March, Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao brought it up in a rare case of a high-ranking official admitting oversights. 

“We have to make sure that farmers sells their land voluntarily. No government official has the right to force farmers give up their lands or cheated them into selling them,” Wen said. 

The government promised to tighten regulation on land trade abuse, but in many cases, the local government was a buyer and a regulator in the transaction. Farmer-right advocates like economist Li Yining urge central government to privatize the farmland, giving farmers property rights over their land. 

With limited land resource and a booming urban population, real estate companies are putting efforts and money into networking with government officials. Government officials and their relatives are found to be using their influence to benefit them in land dealing. Last year, the Ministry of Land and Resource reported 90,000 cases of land abuse, the highest since 1990. 

“The current policy on land use in rural area is the root of the conflict and riot,” wrote Zhou Tianyong, an expert on rural issues, on his Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like Chinese website. He is a proponent of a repeal of the collective land ownership.

“If farmer can control their farmland, there will be less farmland dealing related corruption,” he wrote

It all boils down to whether the next president, Xi Jinping, is willing to reform the farmland trade. Xi has not been seen since Sep. 19, and is speculated to be preparing for the power transition. 

Reach Staff Reporter Meng Meng here.