The Zigong Land/Housing Eviction

Zigong City is an area of 3.2 million in southeastern Sichuan Province, and is one of the four major conurbations in the province. The two cases outlined below involve requisition of farmland and farmers’ houses, the first, for the building of a huge new university campus, and the second for the creation of a purported “development zone” which turned out to be essentially a real estate development.

Compensation low, officials reaping huge profits

The first case covered here is of a group of about 300 villagers making up one production team of Hongqi Xiang who were evicted from their homes and land to make way for the construction of a university, now called Sichuan University of Science and Engineering.[1] In 1985, the land of the whole production team, comprising 380 mu, was taken over for the building of the campus. An agreement for this was made without the knowledge of the affected villagers, but signed by the leaders of the City and the village and production team. To date, the villagers have never been shown the agreement, but information they obtained later leads them to believe that much more of their land was requisitioned than had been authorized.

The second case relates to an adjacent area, but is larger in scale, affecting approximately 30,000 rural people. In 1993, Zigong City allocated an area of 10 square kilometers to set up a “High Tech Innovation and Industrial Development Zone” on land in three administrative villages (乡), Hongqi, Weiping and Fenghuang. Four villages in Hongqi Xiang were put entirely within the area under the High Tech Innovation and Industrial Development Zone Management Committee. The Zigong Party Committee and government delegated extensive powers to this management committee, allowing it to engage in “unified expropriation, unified demolition, unified transfer/assignment, unified sale and unified management” of the land. The appropriate permissions from the State Council and the province for this requisition of land were apparently not obtained. In the 12 years since the establishment of the Zone, the displaced farmers say not a single high tech company has been set up there, but instead housing for sale on the commercial market has been built.

According to representatives of the displaced people, in the Development Zone case compensation for the demolished houses alone should have amounted to 200 million yuan, but 170 million of this was “illegally withheld” (presumably by local officials) and thus a mere 30 million yuan was available to compensate around 30,000 farmers affected to varying degrees by the requisition. By contrast, the profit from the sale of land use rights for the appropriated land is thought to be 5,170 million yuan. In their private capacity, city and provincial officials reportedly set up a share-holding company which profited from the deal.

The scheme for providing replacement housing for Development Zone displaced meant that families were expected to come up with large sums of money to obtain new homes. A 1993 Zigong City Government Document No. 75 on the demolition of housing was crucial in this process: it meant that although the farmers’ land was becoming urban land and they would have to be resettled in urban areas as urban residents, they would only receive compensation levels as rural residents, which were much lower.

The first element of this policy meant that when the city government calculated compensation, regardless of the size of the original dwelling, only 15 m² per person would be provided free of charge. For the remaining floor area, displaced people were compensated at a rate of between 60 and 120 yuan per square meter. The second element meant that the displaced were expected to pay an added premium for the improved quality of the replacement housing. Thus, for example, a family of three living in a dwelling of 150 m² would only be allocated 45 m² under the first principle, while the compensation they received from the Development Zone for the remaining 105 m² would be from 6,300 yuan to 12,600 yuan. If their new home was 80 m², the family would be expected to pay for the “extra” 35 m² at a government-set rate of 780 yuan per square meter, plus a structural improvement fee of 850 yuan per square meter. Thus a displaced family would be expected to pay 20,000 yuan to 30,000 yuan to receive replacement housing of 80 m². In addition, the replacement housing provided for the displaced villagers was invariably of poor quality. Repeated complaints about this have been completely ignored.   

In both cases, many people affected lost not only their homes but also all their land, without being allocated any replacement land. For these people, as part of the resettlement program, jobs were supposed to be provided.[2] In the Hongqi Production Team case, 130 people aged between 18 and 40 were found jobs, but these turned out to be short lived: most found themselves unemployed again after a few months to a year, as the enterprises where they worked went bankrupt or laid off workers. The experience of about 3,000 men and women in the Development Zone case was similar.

Men over 40 and women over 35 were essentially deemed to be unemployable, and thus people in this category were given a monthly stipend, originally set at 35 yuan, now at a rate of 90-96 yuan. These allowances are not sufficient for basic subsistence, and are well below what the income from farming would have been. In the Hongqi Production Team case, no allowance was given for children under 18. In the Development Zone case, children from birth to 18 were eligible for the living allowance, but once they reach 18 the allowance is stopped.

In the Development Zone case, after 1998, many of the displaced were no longer willing to accept the job allocations provided by the government. As an alternative, the government provided a one-off “job finding” payment of 8,000 yuan. A number of those who received such payments bought three-wheeled cycle rickshaws or motorcycles to use for transporting passengers and goods. But this sum of money was hardly enough to set up a small business; many of these one-person endeavors failed, due to lack of money for repairs, traffic accidents, fines by traffic police and so on.

Currently, the problem of unemployment among young people in the area has led to a situation where the Huidong Development Zone has the highest rate of crimes such as theft, robbery, drug taking and murder of any district in Zigong City. Middle aged and old people are relying on selling their labor, hawking fruit and vegetables, shoe shining and mending, and other types of small business. But they too are often subject to official fines and confiscation of their goods and equipment.

The living allowance received by the displaced farmers is not sufficient even to cover basic living expenses and there is no health coverage along with it. If they get sick, they cannot get treatment. Between December 25, 2002, and November 2005, Liu Zhengyou, an activist among the Development Zone displaced farmers, lost five relatives: mother, father, younger brother, uncle and aunt. They all reportedly died without receiving any medical care, as there was no money to pay for it. The younger brother was only 48, and was the main bread winner for his family.

In addition, two City government documents, No. 75 of 1993 and No. 138 of 1996 ordered that compensation for evicted urban and rural residents be strictly differentiated. This meant that urban residents received housing compensation seven times greater than rural residents. This was the case even for rural residents who were transferred to urban residency, and thus no replacement land had to be found for them. The use of this policy in this particular instance compounded the essentially discriminatory nature of the different compensation standards set for relocation of urban and rural residents.

Avenues of redress blocked due to capture of local institutions by local state

In these two cases, the displaced farmers have used every available avenue of potential redress—lawsuits, petitions, administrative review—but have never even succeeded in getting a proper hearing for their grievances.

In the Hongqi Production Team case, on May 26, 2003, all the affected villagers filed a lawsuit in the Zigong Intermediate People’s Court, with the Zigong Vocational University and the original Production Team leader as defendants. The suit charged that the documents stated that the land approved for requisitioning was only 98.63 mu, but in fact 380 mu was taken over. However, after a delay of more than two months, on August 13 that year the court announced that it would not hear the case. The plaintiffs appealed to the Sichuan Higher People’s Court, which overturned the ruling and ordered that the Zigong Intermediate People’s Court hear the case.

But this apparent victory was illusory; on February 20, 2004, the Zigong court threw out the suit on the grounds that the displaced farmers had not paid the required 18,000 yuan in court fees within the prescribed period. With great difficulty, the plaintiffs managed to raise 10,000 yuan to pay the court, and obtained a certificate from their residents committee attesting to their difficulty in paying more. The court took the 10,000 yuan, but still refused to hear the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs had not provided documentary evidence of their claims. As mentioned above, the displaced farmers had never been shown the agreement on the requisition of their land. When asked why the court could not collect the relevant evidence, a judge said they could not compel the defendants to produce the evidence, although in administrative cases the court has the power to do just that and defendants have the burden of proof.

In the Development Zone case, none of the six attempts of the displaced farmers to file lawsuits relating to the case over the 12 years since this process began have resulted in any kind of hearing for the case. The farmers also submitted four appeals against the courts’ refusal to hear the case, and once submitted a petition to higher levels to have this refusal reviewed, without success.[3]

Representatives of the villagers displaced by the Development Zone have repeatedly petitioned on the case in the provincial capital, Chengdu, and in Beijing, without result. In 2002, they also took their case to the national media, and there were a number of reports about it. In July 2003, the head of the Zigong Party Committee Propaganda Department, Qiu Defeng, led a PR delegation to Beijing, visiting government departments and media outlets to distribute a document entitled “Explanation of the Zigong High-Tech and Innovation Development Zone on the Allegations made by Liu Zhengyou.” In July 2004, another PR delegation from Zigong went to Beijing to present a second package of materials, this time headed by Vice-Party Secretary Gao Xianmin and composed of officials from the Party Committee, the government, the Development Zone Management Committee, the Public Security Bureau and the Intermediate Court, as well as lawyers. 

A villager representative, Liu Zhengyou, wrote in one of many open letters to the authorities: “Although in the course of our petitioning activities we have been subjected to intimidation, persecution, detention and violence, we will persist in our use of legal, civilized, rational means to monitor officials and exercise our right to defend our own rights.” This attitude has apparently made a good impression on some local officials in charge of receiving petitioners; they are said to have expressed admiration for the way in which the displaced farmers have carried out their actions and persisted in their cause. In 2001, the Ministry of Construction twice sent letters to Zigong officials stating that they should deal with the complaints after Liu Zhengyou petitioned in Beijing. Also, Sichuan Provincial Construction Bureau sent a similar letter.

Protest actions in Zigong by displaced villagers were suppressed with violence in 1993, 1995 and 1998, 1999. In more recent years, violence and intimidation has continued, with repeated arrests, detentions, and attempts to concoct criminal cases against those seen as “ring leaders” of the petitions. In 2003, displaced farmers held protest actions on April 20, May 20, June 20, 23 and 24 and July 4, in the course of which more than 200 people were detained, 24 people were subjected to criminal detention orders. More than 10 people have suffered permanent injury as a result of beatings in custody, while the deaths of four people—through suicide, untreated health conditions and so on—can be attributed to the requisition. On June 24, 2003, alone, more than 80 displaced farmers were arrested.

On April 20, 2005, Zigong City was holding elections for a new mayor, and representatives of the displaced sought to bring their concerns to an election meeting, but were arrested by plainclothes police. When the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee sent an inspection team to visit Zigong City in November 2005, the City Party Committee and government ordered the City PSB to set up a special investigation and command team. The objective of this team was to intimidate the displaced into silence and to try to make a criminal case against their leaders. In December 2005, more than 20 people were still under detention or questioning.

In the case of the Hongqi Production Team, between 1992 and 2006 displaced farmers tried to reclaim some of their requisitioned land that was not being used, and again and again, police have been used to clear them off. In an incident on July 4, 2003, more than 1,000 police were mobilized to round-up the protesters, and at least 25 people were detained, while 55 were injured, nine of them seriously. Many of these people were elderly women.

On June 23, 2006, farmers went to the city government asking for dialogue, but they were turned back.  They decided to guard one piece of land that was to be bulldozered for construction.  Police came trying to disperse the farmers.  The farmers refused to move.  In the next few days, more than 50 police officers and additional government officials clashed with the farmers.  Several farmers suffered from injuries and were hospitalized.  One farmer, Dai Renshu, male, in his 40s, suffered from a broken finger; and another farmer, Guan Yuqing, male, 73, suffered from scars and swollenness on his arms. By July 1, one elderly lady, Ms. Zhou Qiwan (周岐万), who is in her 70s, remained in the hospital after she was beaten by the police.  Another farmer hospitalized for injury on his head is Huang Shuming.  On June 30, police detained eight farmers and later released 2 of them (Chen Shouxian (陈守先), male, and Zeng Pan (曾盼), female). The eight were taken to the Zigong City Public Security Officers School, the former Custody and Interrogation Center (收审所).  They were beaten if they refused to admit guilty and give the name of anyone who was said to direct them from behind the scene. The police even threat to inject them with HIV/AIDS viruses if they refused to cooperate. On July 1, 2006, the remaining six villagers were taken to the Da An District Public Security Bureau’s Detention Center, Zigong City, where they were given detention orders that they were to be detained for 5-10 days respectively.  Here is a list of the farmers detained:    Chen Shoulin (陈守林), male, 60,  to be detained for 10 days (Mr. Chen was detained previously on June 25, 2003, for 15 days for playing a leadership role in rural protest against forced eviction); Huang Guanzhong (黄光宗), male, in his 60s, to be detained for 10 days; Li Maokui (李茂奎), male, in his 50s, 10 days;  Hu Shuming (胡淑明), female, disabled, 5 days; Wu Liping (吴莉平), female, who has a mental disorder, 10 days, Zeng Zhengying (曾正英), female, 7 days.  More than two hundred farmers have been to the Detention Center, requesting prison visits on June 30 and July 1.  They did not succeed.  No family members have been allowed visits either.  The detained farmers have no lawyers.  Authorities have threatened away local lawyers from taking their cases in the past few years.