A year ago, Wukan made international headlines when the small village's residents staged three waves of large-scale rallies in four months to protest against village officials' alleged illegal land seizures, corruption and violations of financing and election rules.
"Under the current land expropriation system, farmers are almost excluded from benefits of land price appreciation," said Xu Xiaojing, director of the Research Department of Rural Economy with the Development Research Center, a government think tank under the State Council, China's cabinet.
He said the current compensation standard for expropriated land is too low, thus limiting farmers from sharing the revenues of increases in land prices.
"In fact, those farmers who lost their land have been unfairly thrown out from China's industrialization and urbanization process," Xu said, "This is absurd."
In many villages, villagers usually get a reimbursement between 450,000 yuan (about 75,000 U.S. dollars) and 750,000 yuan for each hectare of farmland expropriated, but local governments can cash in millions of yuan in revenue on auctioning a hectare of rural land.
Yang Yuying, a female farmer living in the suburbs of Hefei, the capital city of Anhui Province, fell one of the victims due to such an unfair land seizure system in the country.
Yang and her family was compensated less than one million yuan, along with a 90-square-meter housing unit, for their land seized by the local government.
First alpine rail gets midnight maintenance
Sina Microblog
Tencent Microblog
Feedback
RSS
