'Land Disputes, Rights Assertion and Social Unrest: A Case from Sichuan’

Abstract

This article discusses a land dispute involving several thousand peasants on the outskirts of a city called Zigong, situated in Sichuan Province in China. Their land and houses were taken away from them for the purpose of ‘property development.’ Despite many attempts to get a complaint filed in court, this case did not lead to any court decision on a substantive legal issue, and this is part of the problem of which it is representative. It meant also that deprived citizens could not use the law to protect themselves. Peasants in the Zigong case did not in effect have that position of collective owners of rural land, which they appeared to have according to the law on the books, and they could too easily be deprived of land use rights that were often the basis of their subsistence. Yet the experience of deprivation and disregard as equal citizens made them more aware and more assertive of the fact that they had some legal rights that ought to be protected. The article explores the extent to which activism and legal reform may lead to improved protection of peasant land rights, drawing a skeptical conclusion.

Keywords: China, land rights, property, urbanisation