Why the Chinese are rising up in Wukan

The Wukan case says a lot about the serious tension between state and society in the fast urbanising China. It is difficult to play the land requisition game fairly under the current system, since farmers are neither allowed to negotiate directly on the compensation package, nor are they allowed to develop their own land for non-agricultural purposes. They have to sell their land to local government first, which defines the price then leases the land to industrial and commercial/residential users for a profit. As land prices keep rising in China, it is not surprising that farmers with rising expectations are becoming increasingly unhappy. As a result, mass incidents, sometimes as violent as in Wukan, are inevitable.

Local authorities in China, in their pursuit of revenue via aggressive urbanisation and industrialisation, are also undermining the country’s grassroots democracy. It was usually local officials who would carry out difficult negotiations with village collectives, or who were in charge of coercing defiant farmers to accept government terms. Having village cadres who shared their interests would not only lower the selling price but also determine whether or not the transaction could take place at all. Therefore, township and county officials in localities that experienced greater land requisition had a stronger incentive to manipulate village democracies to make sure that more co-operative cadres were elected.