This land is my land

“LAND to the tiller” has been a slogan of Chinese revolutionaries since Sun Yat-sen used it in 1924. Mao Zedong came to power in 1949 with just such a promise. Now some of China's peasants want his party to make good on the pledge. Late last year groups in different parts of China began simply claiming land as their own individual private plots.
China's constitution decrees that rural land is owned by “collectives”. But it does not make clear who represents these collectives. This vagueness has been one of the biggest causes of rural unrest in recent years. Rural officials, eager to make money for themselves as well as their localities, often appropriate land from farmers to sell to developers. They say they are acting on behalf of the collective. The farmers disagree. If they receive any compensation at all, it is only a fraction of the market value.

Isolated groups of peasants elsewhere followed suit, including some in Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Sichuan and Tianjin. Villagers have likened themselves to the group of peasants in 1978 in a village in central Anhui, who broke up the land into plots farmed by individual households. At the time, they seemed to be taking a big risk. But the party itself soon decided that the Mao-era communal farms had failed and households should be allocated plots of land. The Anhui villagers became famous and the new “household-responsibility system” pushed up yields and incomes. Land ownership remained unchanged.

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In the past, rural officials have taken land from farmers and peasants to sell to developers in order to make money. These people fell that they have been violated and are starting to take a stand against this act.