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CHINA'S RURAL MILLIONS BEING LEFT BEHIND

In many countries people tend to think of the countryside as green fields and happy folk. When Chinese folk think about the countryside they think of a grim, dirty place where people are poor and life is harsh. China's urban population has a strong tendency to look down on country folk. "Rural people are of a very low quality" is a phrase you often hear in Beijing. And rural people are not just treated like second class citizens, they are.

Almost everything in the countryside is considered inferior to the cities. People say the schools are bad, the teachers awful; there are few doctors, and hardly any hospitals, local communist party officials are invariably corrupt, and often abuse their power for personal gain. In the last decade, two things have happened to make the tension between the city and the countryside worse.

One is that the countryside has begun moving to the city. Almost 150 million Chinese peasants have quit their villages and headed to the cities to look for work. The second is that the city is moving to the countryside. As China's urban centres boom they are gobbling up farmland at a voracious rate. A total of 16 million acres (6,475,000 hectares) have gone in the last 20 years.

The tens of millions who have moved to the cities find themselves treated like second class citizens there too. People born in rural China find it almost impossible to become full urban residents. They are denied access to urban housing and to urban schooling for their children. Work is found in factories or on construction sites. Life is a tenuous, hand-to-mouth existence.

Last year a rural migrant was sentenced to death for a brutal double murder. The man had stabbed his victims to death during a fight at a building site. The argument was over a claim for back-wages. It turned out the man had not been paid for two years.

The only security these rural migrants enjoy is their piece of land back in their village. But that too is now under threat. In China, agricultural land is owned communally. In theory each village owns the land around it. Each family holds its bit of land on a long term lease. Farmland used to be almost worthless. But as China's cities expand it is now in high demand.

What happened to the village of Yangge is typical. Yangge sits along a picturesque river 25km north of the city of Beijing. It is just the sort of area in which Beijing's wealthy new middle class might like to own a spacious suburban villa. That is exactly what a Beijing property developer thought. He paid several million dollars to acquire the land from the local township government. The villagers were never consulted, and they saw none of the money. Now, less than 100m from the village, rows of huge new western-style homes are rising out of the fields. A thousand are to be built. The asking price - close to $1m each.

All over China land disputes like this are turning violent. The anger and bitterness emanating from China's countryside is not so much about poverty, as about fairness. People see their land being taken from them and then turned into $1m-homes. They see local officials lining their own pockets, while the villagers get nothing. They spend years away from home working on construction sites and in Dickensian factories, only to be cheated of their wages by unscrupulous bosses. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has promised to bring prosperity to China's countryside. But without fundamental change in the way China works, its 700 million peasant farmers will remain second class citizens.

Source: Intercessors Network