The Fight Against Enclosure in China

Guangdong is an important area to understand, although it can be hard to try and get a grip on. There are countless books advising multinational corporations how best to exploit the conditions and resources of the province, but very little coverage in the media of the struggles that have been going on there. The problems with getting information out of China, the language barrier and Western stereotypes about passive Chinese workers are probably all factors in this. But sometimes stories about the increasingly powerful protests break through. We’re used to hearing the stories of suicides at work-camp like factories, of marginalised migrant labour and tragedies. But we hear far more rarely about the uprisings and successes.

Guangdong is a province where multinationals are given special license to run rampant, with little regard to health and safety or human rights. In the “special economic zones” products are manufactured for export in huge factories staffed by a largely young, female, migrant population that is not properly covered by labour laws or social benefits. Workers have become increasingly militant, to the extent that the government are having to start to make concessions.

Of course the other side of capitalism is enclosure, and that’s what’s making the news this week. To get a needy population who are ‘willing’ to work for a pittance, and the land to build your factories on, you have to steal land. It’s what happened all over Europe, and then the rest of the world, and it’s still going on in many places. Land that people can grow food on, and live on, has no place in an economic playground for multinational companies like Guangdong. The villagers of Wukon have stood up to the collusion between business and the political classes to seize their land. One man is dead, others are beaten and in custody, and now the entire village is under siege.

This article in the Telegraph ends with a quote from Shen Shaorong, the mother of a man still in custody “I have just been to see my 25-year-old son… He has been beaten to a pulp and his clothes were ripped. Please tell the government in Beijing to help us before they kill us all.” It’s an easy request to fulfil and knowing that the outside world is watching can make a big difference: The number for the Chinese embassy in London is: 020-72994049. Here’s all their other contact details if they’re not picking up.

Guangdong: The Frontline of the Fight Against Enclosure | Topsoil

Since September, residents of the fishing village of Wukan, in Guandong Province, China, have been protesting government plans to build factories, luxury apartments, and shopping malls on stolen land.

Land seizures are common in China. According to The New York Times, over 70 million Chinese farmers were forced from their land between 1994 and 2004 Up to 80 percent of these land seizures were illegal.

Farmers have nowhere to turn. Official corruption is widespread. The New York Times reports that developers often pay government officials 50 times the amount given to farmers as compensation.

According to Human Rights Watch, those who seek official redress are often beaten, bullied, and imprisoned. Suicide is so common that in 2006 Beijing passed a law banning "suicide protests."

Tell President Hu Jintao to stop all land seizures!

Stop Land Seizures in China! - The Petition Site

The Occupy Wall Street protests in the U.S. are a delayed reaction to a bursting property bubble, which led to a jobs crisis and rising anger over financial influence and wealth disparity. What’s happening right now In China — angry protesters seizing a village and forcing Communist officials to retreat — is a dramatic example of what happens when a similar toxic mix plays out in a totalitarian society.

The protests in Wukan, a coastal village in Guangdong province, began three months ago over land seizures. They exploded this week after party officials tried to seal off Wukan with riot police, setting up roadblocks, blocking fishing boats, and beating residents. On Wednesday the party was forced to back down, saying it would halt a controversial real estate project and investigate local officials. The images out of Wukan are a startling contrast to the usual way Chinese officials manage to snuff out any sign of public discord.

At the heart of the protests is a corrupt system in which local officials seize land, evict poor tenants, and sell it to rich developers to fund government operations. A Bloomberg article last October described this strange twist on the Communist Revolution:

Mao Zedong won the hearts of the masses by redistributing land from rich landlords to penniless peasants. Now, powerful local officials are snatching it back, sometimes violently, to make way for luxury apartment blocks, malls and sports complexes in a debt-fueled building binge. City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.

Market reforms that began under Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s sparked spectacular economic growth — and widened the divisions between rich and poor, city dwellers and farmers. The share of income collected by the top 1 percent of China’s earners more than doubled between 1986 and 2003, to 5.87 percent, according to the incomes database of Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. (That was still lower than the share held at the time by their U.S. counterparts, 14.87 percent.) China ranked 53rd on the CIA’s list of countries with the most unequal incomes — lower than the U.S. (40) — based on 2007 data.

China's Wealth Disparity Erupts in Wukan Protests - BusinessWeek