NEW CHINESE LAW TACKLES 30-YEAR REIGN OF LANDGRABS, EVICTIONS

Farmers in China have faced forced evictions and illicit land grabs for decades – sources of social unrest that the government is finally trying to address in a major shake-up of its property law.

Millions of hectares of rural land were taken away from farmers in the past three decades and given to developers as China raced to urbanize, often with little or no compensation in return, wrote Poornima Weerasekara for the Agence France Presse (AFP) on June 5, 2020. Rural migrants living in run-down inner-city areas have also been forcefully evicted in recent years as cities fight congestion.

“Land disputes trigger half of an estimated 100,000 social protests in China every year, making them the second leading cause for public unrest after labor disputes,” Ni Yulan, a lawyer who advocates for property rights of low-income families in Beijing, told AFP. Local governments have taken away land from 100,000 to 500,000 farmers every year between 2005 to 2015 in violation of national land-use laws, according to a study by Qiao Shitong, a property and urban law professor at the University of Hong Kong.

In China, land can only be owned by the state or collective organizations. Private individuals or businesses can only buy the right to use land for up to 70 years. The civil code – for the first time – clarifies what will happen once a home owner’s 70-year usage rights expire. The law affirms that land-use rights for residential homes will be automatically renewed after expiration but does not say whether owners need to pay for renewals.