China: Great Dragon Rising - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 307

mechanized and very efficient, are located near
highly demanding urban centers. Most of them are
in the more developed coastal provinces.

their land appropriated with little if any compensation.
Since the mid-1990s, some 17 million acres (42 million ha)
have been lost. This is possible because in China, people
have “user-rights” to land, not “ownership rights.” Al-
though such actions are illegal, a snarled bureaucracy and
corruption prevents farmers from recourse.
“Collective incidents” is a euphemism for “protests.”
In 2005 alone, there were more than 5 million protesters
in 87,000 collective incidents over land appropriations
especially in the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing
coastal provinces. The government wants to “build a new
socialist countryside” and says that such land grabs are
against the law . Nevertheless, protesters are arrested,
many are beaten, and some have their homes burnt to the
ground by local officials.

With these efforts to balance social equality and eco-
nomic efficiency , some problems have arisen. For exam-
ple, many farmers work part-time in local industries that
manufacture everything from pencils to motor scooters.
Others find full-time employment in cities. Many young
people do not want to farm. This means that there is a
shortage of farmers, which is all the more reason to con-
solidate land and mechanize.
The government is continually formulating policies to
increase food production. Aside from increasing produc-
tion at home, China is looking elsewhere for farmland. In
recent years, it has leased agricultural land in other coun-
tries such as Kazakhstan, Laos, Brazil, and Cuba.

The HukouSystem

“COLLECTIVE INCIDENTS”
All is not well with China' is 800 million farmers. Just as
the urban-rural income gap has widened, so has the gap
between rich and poor farmers. With monetary inequity
comes power inequity . Both educational and health-care
facilities in the countryside are entirely inadequate. Stu-
dents must buy their own topics and people pay a fee for
health care. Poorer farmers cannot afford these things.
Accessible lowland is becoming scarce in the east be-
cause of demands of state and city occupants, peasant
house construction, soil erosion, and consumption by lo-
cal industry . Farmland in the east has been lost at the rate
of 16,556 acres (6,700 hectares) annually since 1979.
Another problem is the return to fragmentation of land
with family farming. Pollution, from increased use of
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as the accumu-
lation of refuse, especially plastics, has become a serious
problem in small towns and villages. New economic en-
terprises are also polluters.
Free-flying development without building or mainte-
nance of rural infrastructure has caused serious problems.
For example, 40 percent of rural villages have no access to
running water. Pollution of soil, groundwater, and air is
worsening as factories and coal-power plants expand into
the countryside. Essential irrigation systems are in disrepair
because farmers think of them as public property and have
no sense of individual responsibility to fix them. Increasing
infringement on farm space is a critical issue with regard to
the feeding of China' s still burgeoning population.
Probably the most volatile issue is illegal land appro-
priation by corrupt local officials to sell to developers.
Since the early 1980s, 30 to 40 million farmers have had

Socioeconomic position and opportunities for mobility
are controlled by a household registration system known
as hukou. Every Chinese citizen is registered as nonagri-
cultural (mostly urban) or agricultural (mostly rural).
Nonagricultural persons are heavily subsidized by the
state in grain rations, housing, medical care, and so forth.
Registration includes one' s particular geographic loca-
tion, and it is very difficult to alter one' is classification.
Hukou denotes one' s identity and place in society .
Until the 1980s, the system rooted people to their
birthplace and allowed little movement elsewhere. A mi-
grant was excluded from most desirable jobs and subsi-
dized housing and benefits. It is extremely difficult to
change one' s hukou, especially from agricultural to nona-
gricultural and to thereby shift location from rural to
urban. Nonagricultural hukou are considered superior to
agricultural hukou.
Since market reforms have produced a sizable labor
surplus, the state has allowed temporary migration to
towns and cities, although permanent change of status
remains strictly controlled. Millions of men have moved
to cities such as Shanghai to work on new construction
projects. Millions of others migrate from rural farms to
work on state farms in the eastern provinces. Also, hun-
dreds of thousands of women migrate to new manufac-
turing centers such as Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.
Geographers Cindy Fan and Y ouqin Huang (1998)
have discovered a trend of marriage migration. Many
women in poorer areas employ kinship and friend net-
works as well as marriage brokers to marry someone lo-
cated in a more desirable area. Women gain access to