As far as land grabs go, it was quiet and secret -- and the perpetrators almost got away with it.

Almost 200 Chinese city government officials stealthily changed their identities on the administrative computer system and immediately became eligible for a countryside housing plot of up to 144 square meters.

The civil servants had taken advantage of China's long established hukou -- or household registration -- system, which identifies everyone as a "rural" or "urban" resident depending on their place of birth.

A group of local farmers blew the whistle on the fraud in a series of letters to the organization department of the Communist Party Committee of Yiwu city, east China's Zhejiang Province, at the beginning of the year.

News of the scandal soon broke and caused an outcry among both rural and urban dwellers.

"It's theft," said rural resident He Guofeng. "The civil servants changed their registration status to get plots of land that are supposed to be allocated to farmers."

Fellow countryside resident Yang Huiyi branded it "immoral." "The civil servants already enjoy better social security and now they want to take from the farmers."

Sensing rising public discontent, the city government nullified the household registration changes of 195 officials.

LIVING OFF THE LAND

Long considered by rural folk the key to a better life, an urban hukou comes with an array of benefits, covering healthcare, social security and education, that are unavailable or less accessible to farming families.

The lure of better prospects for themselves and their children has seen generations of rural Chinese striving to obtain a hard-won urban hukou.

But the Yiwu revelations indicated that the human tide from China's countryside to cities may be slowing -- and in some cases ebbing.

The central government adopted the hukou system in 1951 to restrict and regulate the movement of people by tying everyone to their place of birth.

Though the overwhelming majority of Chinese still prefer an urban hukou, many people in wealthier cities such as Yiwu, the seat of China's largest small-commodity distribution center, see a rural hukou as an asset.

The Yiwu officials had found a rural hukou came with an allocation of land and compensation for land requisitions, said a local official who refused to be identified.

Each rural family under the city administration is entitled to a housing plot ranging from 108 to 144 square meters, under Yiwu's Regulation of Implementation of New Rural Housing Construction, issued in 2006.

Sale of the rural homes is still prohibited, but the owners can make substantial amounts of money by renting them out in a market where home prices are rocketing.

"I rent my house for 2,000 yuan (293.85 U. S. dollars) a month," says an Internet cafe owner in rural Yiwu. "A house on 108 square meters can bring more than 50,000 yuan a year, almost equal to the yearly income of a civil servant."