China is not a democracy. The government is not accountable to the people.

So shut up and do what you're told.

Undermining democracy??

But China is a Communist country; any claim to democracy has always been totally fictitious.

Nimbys

how do these locale elections work in China? do all candidates have to be members of the party?

Wonderful people ruled by monsters.

As land prices keep rising in China, it is not surprising that farmers with rising expectations are becoming increasingly unhappy.

The CCP cadres are all to happy to re leave the farmers of the one time big profit they could have made.
As communists The Party was anti farmer; as capitalists they are........anti farmer.

It happened to us in the enclosure. The thieves prospered and are yet in possession of the stolen goods.

I am more worried about Chinese exploitation of Africa.

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This sound appalling. If only governments could see their people as the relatives they truly are and not some sub species to be exploited.

As I understand it our entire country was nicked by William of Normandy, and handed down the generations until 1000 years later it is still largely in the possession of the sons and daughters of those Norman Thieves. And ever since, we dispossessed anglo saxons have been expected to tug our forelocks in deference to their thievery.

Beat that!

quote:-
"And ever since, we dispossessed anglo saxons have been expected to tug our forelocks in deference to their thievery. ...Beat that ! "

Easy, the Celts having there land stolen by the Anglo Saxons
Now back to the Chinese please.

Why on earth are we sticking with centuries old democratic models when technology would allow us to implement true democracy - not party affiliated with no one being whipped to ensure they vote for another persons choice

after all the technology is available.for us all to participate in every decision.

Petitions can are raised. One person elected to represent each street in the country

On a Sunday we can hold small street meetings to discuss all proposals for local, regional, national and international issues

Votes can be cast and counted and the results entered electronically and posted electronically

If votes are cast for a proposal then we pay lawyers to write the new laws, the laws are approved by a chosen method and the laws come into force

After all the current method of democracy obviously means politicians are making decisions practically no one agrees with

This would also stop politicians using our armed forces to attack other countries unless the majority of the nation agrees

This would also stop politicians from lowering business taxes unless the majority of the nation agrees

This would also stop politicians from taking money from the disabled unless the majority of the nation agrees

This would also stop politicians from allowing state assets from being sold cheap and given away unless the majority of the nation agrees

Yes, we have the technology and the time to introduce a true modern democracy

What do you think

What better way to bring communities together and return us to our true roots of being small villages, looking out for each other and sharing in the decisions that affect us all

Sorry, 'Anglo - Celtic'

It's conceivable that direct votes on some of these issues (similar to referendums) can work under some circumstances. But most people do not have the time to analyze every bill and make an informed decision. That's why we have full-time elected representatives. It's not a perfect system.

As far as waging war, we can't do this by popular vote. The President will always have access to information that we don't, and we definitely want it that way.

I live in China and can tell you that it has perfectly good property laws. It's just that the corruption is rife and the Chinese people are anything but cowed. Wukan will keep fighting.

If I were in the shoes of the party officials I would be quaking in them. Beijing does not like attention of this sort.

MarkoTobias
16 December 2011 3:41PM
I am more worried about Chinese exploitation of Africa.

So, the west didn't take its' chance to help Africa. China has done more to help than the west managed in a 100 years.

Our loss, and your comment is outrageous.

Don't worry about the land grab bit. We have a 'democracy' and developers and entrepreneurs have been grabbing our land for centuries.

The land has to be sold to the local government who then lease it to developers. The profits and ownership stay in local government for use by the community.

It seems a better system than the one we have over here which can first makes people bubble millionaires and then suddenly homeless while Goldman Sachs runs off with the sacks

In all honesty this arrangement is an indication of one or a myriad things we can learn from China and their way od doing things.

By the way, how many people have died in police custody in Britain in the past year? Or shot by trigger happy uniformed incompetents?.

I am a little surprised to see a Chinese writer picking at his country in the West albeit with such very feebly made arguments.

But then I see he is a fellow of the Brookings institution in Washington, and things kinda predictably fall into place. (We'll have she of the Queen Annes making a derisory pronouncement next. Desperation and dirties grow.)

ScottishLady, I've a lot of sympathy for your constructive proposal. In particular, the deference to the will of the people is heartening in a place so stuffed full of self-styled intellectuals who glibly deem the rest of humanity (apart from themselves) as incapable of making rational decisions.

China is fascist. The Chinese govt only serves the interests of capitalists. It's is ludicrious to say it is remotely communistic that is unless you can provide some examples of wealth distribution.

The land grabbing in China is the kind of primitive capital accumulation in the form of land enclosures that happened in England centuries ago when people were thrown out of public land and which Marx described in his work.

David Harvey argues that much of the global growth of capital and the economy the last 20 years is not because of returns on capital investment but it is underpinned by debt and this primitive land grabbing in China, India and Africa.

And with debt not available it is all grinds to a halt now.

Prepare for landing.

Communist??
The current Chinese gov't owe more to milton friedman than Karl Marx I'm afraid.
And that has been the case for quite a while now.
Do catch up.

As China is urbanising fast, land requisition takes place in more Chinese villages, in particular those closest to the cities. Farmers with rising expectations on the one hand, and local officials with financial stakes in keeping the compensation low on the other, are bound to lead to increasingly violent mass incidents. Local governments in China needs to spend more not only on compensating farmers, but also on maintaining social stability.

In China the State owns all the land. I don't know how this works out at the local municipal level since neither the higher provincial nor the state level governments are going to intervene in the millions of municipal level disputes. The point here is the protests are about the amount of compensation, not about land grabs or land ownership or the usual BS about human rights ad democracy. The ousted land occupants of course want to be made whole or preferably more than whole. Mass protests is their only one chance to achieve this. Smaller groups and individuals have no chance at all. The authorities of course want to pay the minimum.

In my observations about how the Chinese government seeks a solution to many societal problems such as land compensation and loss of wages compensation in bankruptcy cases is to try as many ad hoc methods as they can. Let all the possible problems come out of the woodwork over a number of years and see what works, what doesn't and what causes real problems such as violent mass riots. Then write the laws, or more likely as administrative guidelines, on how to handle each situation that will result in the least social unrest. Not everyone will be satisfied but the majority will accept the measures and move on. The idea is to come to a Goldilocks solution where enough compensation is paid so that it is not worth the time and effort to fight for more. A very good example is the recent dispute over unpaid wages of a bankrupt manufacturing concern where the protestors were rounded up and brought back to their factories. They were told they would be paid 60% of their owed wages. They can either accept that or get nothing. I would. The 60% rate is not set in stone. But adjusting the rate to provide better satisfaction is an easy thing to do. If lowering the 60% makes it worthwhile for the protestors to keep fighting it will certainly reflect poorly on that municipal authority and perhaps bring a rebuke from their higher ups.

I may be reading more into this than there is. Mass gatherings, especially protest mobs, are not allowed in China. The "mob" can easily swell to tens of thousands with innocent bystanders and rubberneckers. It just takes a few opportunistic troublemakers to turn this into a riot, panic and property destruction. And of course the western media to attribute the riot as a sign that there is widespread popular discontent against the brutal regime in Beijing. So a modest crowd with real grievances (land compensation, lost wages, poor working conditions) is allowed to form and state their grievance publicly. This forces the authority concerned to deal with the problem and answer to the public. Then the protestors are quickly removed from the scene before they become unmanageable and sterilized in some distant place to cool off then released. No one is charged except for a few extremist ones. Try forming a protest crowd of human rights, democracy, green environmental and other western pressure group issues and you will have the police whack you and cart you off before you can say mama. You can compare what you see happening in the way the West deals with their protestors if you like. But I like what I see in China's way of dealing with societal issues. That's all that matters.

china is not a democracy, of any sort.

neither is any other nation, with the possible exception of helvetia.

western governments are not accountable to the people, for even if voted out, they do not hang. generally indeed, their crimes are usually invisible to the untutored eye and most often protected by 'secret' labels.

please don't confuse elections with democracy- choosing which of two bandits will rule you happened in the war of the roses, the only advance since then is replacing spears with ballots.

But China is a Communist country; any claim to democracy has always been totally fictitious.

It is a capitalist dictatorship.

China is only follow the example of western countries where the majority of land is owned by a few.

The English people had all their land stolen from them by 1840, the Scottish a couple of decades later. That's what happens. A handful of people own both the land they work on and the land their homes stand on. Everyone else pays rent and works for wages.

They would enclose the air too if it was possible, then we would have to pay airowners just to stay alive.

Please don't conflate land with capital. One is a gift of nature and fixed in supply. The other is the product of human labour and is in unlimited supply.

Conflation of land and capital obscures understanding of the process and makes it impossible to propose effective solutions to the problem.

In the USA, the "White Man" wiped out most of the Native Americans in less than 100 years in arguably the biggest land grab in history. Their rationale? (a) The natives were savages (i.e. non-Christian, so it didn't matter) and (b) God had actually given the land to the White Man (the natives were, essentially squatters).

Look at what the US foreign policy has done to Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Philippines and Chile. And they're not alone. "Great" Britain's treatment of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The French in Vietnam and Cambodia, Belgium in Congo, Spain in South America and Holland in Indonesia.

While China's action is to be despised, let's not forget that they have lots of role models...

@ themissing: 16 December 2011 11:02PM

China is only follow the example of western countries where the majority of land is owned by a few.

Your example had been repeated time and time again over China's entire 2300 years since unification. The rich and powerful grab even larger and larger swaths of land leaving millions of landless peasants destitute and entirely dependent on the landlord class. This landlord class in the process became powerful enough to challenge and weaken the throne and state power, not for the throne, but to pressure the throne to give them even more privileges. Then comes this cycle of uprisings, the fall of the old dynasty and the rise of a new one. These regime changes cannot be called revolutions as they did no more than replace the old one with another one just like it.

With the 1949 Liberation one of the CPC's most fundamental reforms was to do away with private land ownership. The state owns all the land. The current manifestation of this law is land for residential purposes carry a leasehold of 75 years. Lands used for commercial, industrial or agricultural carry 30 year leases (renewable.) Thus no private person can again accumulate land into large estates and pass it on to his descendants. The hated landlord class in china will never rise again.

The unintended consequences of this law holds many advantages for China's development.

One is the local authorities do not have to deal with land ownership disputes when planning large infrastructure projects.. Just visit the Municipal Planning Center in downtown Beijing or Shanghai. There will be a gigantic 1:750 scale model of each city. Bordering the 3D models will be plan view photographs of the area beyond showing planned future development on a grand scale complete with rational service and transportation corridors in the best practices in town planning. The remarkable thing is that those plans will be realized within the decade. That's why you see futuristic cities springing up practically overnight all over China.

Another unintended consequence is the rapid and seamless reallocation of production resources (abandoned bankrupt factories.) Its not uncommon for factory owners who face sudden bankruptcy the remove as many of their assets (production machinery) in the night and disappear. This abandoned building sits on land owned by the state and is therefore valueless without state approval for its disposal. The authorities can easily seize it for unpaid taxes and any number of other reasons. Then reallocate it promptly to another entrepreneur free of encumbrances. You won't have those horrible rusting, crumbling buildings that so blight the cities of America and elsewhere.

Chinese laws and practices are different from those in the West. Do be careful when you extrapolate your Western experience into China's conditions.

SWCC (Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) is characterized by pragmatism. The stated goal is to maintain stability and grow the economy so that the largest number of Chinese citizens can improve their lives, year in and year out.

With the establishment of New China, Mao inherited a nation that was poorer than poor. Over 90% agrarian, over 80% illiterate. Mao was a brilliant military strategist, as his handling of both the American back KMT, and the mighty American invasion forces in Korea, showed. But Mao was not a good manager of peacetime economy. The first 30 years of the young republic saw an economy that left a lot to be desired.

When Deng, Xiao Ping took over the rein in 1978, the nation with the largest population in the world (I think it was 9.65 Billion at that time), had a GDP per capita that was literally at the bottom end. Some estimated it to be No. 2 LOWEST. That was history.

But in the 33 years since Deng's prescription of "实事求是" pragmatism was implemented, the Chicoms led SWCC had literally been the best performing economic system in human history. By 2011, China is approximately 50% urbanized, 97% literate, and having the world's largest steel, cement, and aluminum industries­, 90% of rare earths produced, No. 2 supercompu­ter in the world, the fastest and biggest high speed train network, etc., etc., AND with $3.2 Trillion in cash to spare, and almost NO foreign debts, after 33 years of unbroken growth at close to 10%.

The future of China lies in continued urbanization. A country cannot be rich with half of its folks living hand to mouth on the land. With a nation of limited land resources, future urbanization in China WILL mean taking land from the current users.

First of all, if a killing (for example in Wukan) is wrong, the perpetrators should be swiftly put to the law, and punished justly to further deterrence, and due compensation sought and given. If executions are necessary, so be it. You kill, you pay with your life; that is the Chinese way.

But the issue of the dead village negotiator must be segregated from the underlying issue of who should have control over land use, and whether the existing user (or quasi owner) should and could be compensated.

Most land in China still remains owned by the State. So purely from a legal ownership and procedural point of view, the village administration of Wukan probably is within its rights to dispose of the land for the best and highest use. However, the practical limitation is that ideas of free market have often caused the current users to hold out for higher RMB compensation. Feelings are further fanned, when society can see that the developers, who clearly have bribed many on their way up, are rich beyond comparison (most of the richest in China were developers until the recent Beijing imposed downturn). The perception leads to seething anger, bubbling over as demonstrations that threaten social stability.

Chicoms' ultimate goal, looking back at Deng's various speeches over the years, is to improve the lives of as many Chinese as possible. Deng had initially instructed that it is OK to have some regions of China get rich first. But too much concentration of wealth is anathema to the goal of improving everyone's lives.

It would seem that a simple (at the risk of being simplistic) solution would be to impose a national law, that mandates that current users/owners (whose land is taken) automatically become stakeholders in the real estate projects. It does not have to be a large percentage - 5%, 10%, but it should be a fixed immutable number that the lower level officials cannot change. No negotiations means that people's expectations will accordingly be adjusted. The stakes can be freely traded, with the law prohibiting (and rendering legally void) attempts by the developer or the local government officials to buy the stakes at artificially low prices). So the displaced could have a wad of cash to start new lives, or hang on to it and pass it to progeny. Society can gain a vibrant market for a new form of real estate rights. That way a wide swath of Chinese society would benefit as the nation continues its march on to 80% urbanization.

One man one vote, in direct democracy for everything. I do not believe that had been attempted by any major society in human history. Even the Greeks, who invented democracy, restrict voting to only free men (not the slaves or the conquered).

One would fear the magnified effects of demagogy, and mob rule.

Instead, in human history, all societies are ruled by elites, who presumably know more and know better. That was how the human race progressed.

http://cumgranosalisdossetto.blogspot.com/2011/12/revolution-in-china.html

Bit of a shock to the old progressive psyche to realize communism doesn't ever work to bring democracy and human rights.

CONSTITUTION OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
(Adopted on December 4, 1982)
....
Article 8. Rural people's communes, agricultural producers' co-operatives, and other forms of co- operative economy such as producers' supply and marketing, credit and consumers co-operatives, belong to the sector of socialist economy under collective ownership by the working people. Working people who are members of rural economic collectives have the right, within the limits prescribed by law, to farm private plots of cropland and hilly land, engage in household sideline production and raise privately owned livestock. The various forms of co-operative economy in the cities and towns, such as those in the handicraft, industrial, building, transport, commerical and service trades, all belong to the sector of socialist economy under collective ownership by the working people. The state protects the lawful rights and interests of the urban and rural economic collectives and encourages, guides and helps the growth of the collective economy.

Article 9. Mineral resources, waters, forests, mountains, grassland, unreclaimed land, beaches and other natural resources are owned by the state, that is, by the whole people, with the exception of the forests, mountains, grassland, unreclaimed land and beaches that are owned by collectives in accordance with the law. The state ensures the rational use of natural resources and protects rare animals and plants. The appropriation or damage of natural resources by any organization or individual by whatever means is prohibited.

Article 10. Land in the cities is owned by the state. Land in the rural and suburban areas is owned by collectives except for those portions which belong to the state in accordance with the law; house sites and private plots of cropland and hilly land are also owned by collectives. The state may in the public interest take over land for its use in accordance with the law. No organization or individual may appropriate, buy, sell or lease land, or unlawfully transfer land in other ways. All organizations and individuals who use land must make rational use of the land.

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html

It would seem that a simple (at the risk of being simplistic) solution would be to impose a national law, that mandates that current users/owners (whose land is taken) automatically become stakeholders in the real estate projects. It does not have to be a large percentage - 5%, 10%, but it should be a fixed immutable number that the lower level officials cannot change.

I think I read here on The Guardian that in Athens small plot holders privately partnered with a developer to get an apartment when their small plot got developed.

In China, development I believe is a major source of local government funding (and often of unofficial government official enrichment).

I don't know the Chinese statutory law under which compensation is currently based.

The Chinese perhaps should allow each household to get a pick of one unit of their choice in the completed project. They should also get moving money, short-term rental money, and farm to industrial employment transition money.

As far as waging war, we can't do this by popular vote. The President will always have access to information that we don't, and we definitely want it that way.

The President? Isn't Congress supposed to have the final say on warmaking? Ie the directly elected representatives of the people?

As for the access of the President to information, you can't mean on WMD's and such like can you?

In theory at least, the whole country still belongs to the Crown. I.e. "freehold" land is held free of charge, but it is not, ultimately, the "property" of the freeholder.

This is not "communism" - this is a "communist" party. Not quite the same thing.

Mao said that "Capitalist Roaders" were trying to take over the Party and he launched the Cultural Revolution to try to stop them. His cure did not work, but his diagnossi was demonstrably correct.