Mass participation rural protests in China fell "markedly" in
2006 and would continue to drop if government officials worked hard
to deal with the concerns of farmers. The top advisor to the
government on rural policy, Chen Xiwen, delivered this message
yesterday. ?
"Overall the volume of rural mass incidents in 2006 clearly fell
from the previous year," said Chen, director of the Office of
Central Rural Work Leading Group, at a press conference hosted by
the State Council Information Office in Beijing.
Chen revealed that he estimated the decline in protests was
close to 20 percent. There'd been 23,000 such incidents on the
Chinese mainland last year with less than half in the
countryside.
Nearly half of the rural protests, including petitions and
riots, were triggered by illegal land seizures or expropriation and
the remainder sparked by farmers' discontent over village finances
and pollution, said Chen. ?
To deal with the problems the State Council had ordered local
governments to raise compensation for farmers who lost land for
development projects. The State Council also demanded that
vocational training be provided for them and re-employment services
made available as well as bringing them under the social security
umbrella, Chen explained. ?
The State Council has also started to hold provincial
governments responsible for diverting farmland to other uses in
excess of quotas, Chen added.
China had to do whatever it could to prevent farmland from
shrinking below the 120-million-hectare warning line to ensure food
security in years ahead, Chen told China Daily. The farmland
acreage was 122.1 million hectares at the end of 2005.
There were ways to complain but the key was to ensure that the
channels to do so were clear and government officials handle issues
concerning the interests of farmers strictly in line with statutes
and policies, Chen added. If their interests were not prejudiced
they'd hold fewer grudges, he added. ??
"It's still the case that issues that arose several years ago
have not been properly resolved or not resolved to farmers'
satisfaction and so they're still unhappy and continue to
complain," he said.
Chen said government officials should not neglect farmers'
petitions on the pretext that they are trivial. Instead they should
make every effort to resolve the problems promptly.
Relations between farmers and local officials had improved
following the phasing out of the centuries-old agricultural tax and
the building of a market system for grain distribution. In the past
they'd been strained largely because rural officials were
responsible for collecting the revenue and grain directly from
farmers, Chen said.
(China Daily January 31, 2007)