Land Expropriation and Rural Conflicts in China

In the early spring of 1999, I was conducting fieldwork on agricultural development in a township in northeast Yunnan.This study is a result of my fieldwork carried out in February–March 1999 and again in December 1999 in the township where I conducted household surveys in three villages (20–30 households in each, depending on the size of village, by random sampling) and interviews with village leaders and officials at township and county levels. The township, which I call Banyan, is under the jurisdiction of a county-city (xianji shi) that acquired its urban status in 1994. One afternoon, as I was sitting by a kitchen fire interviewing a housewife in a village two kilometres from the township seat, some people from the neighbourhood walked in, and it did not take long before a crowd gathered in the room. No sooner had I concluded my interview when voices roared from the audience. Taken by the villagers for a reporter, I was bombarded with bitter accounts of the ongoing land expropriation in their community.