road construction, public services, residential construction, forestation and even parking fees for agricultural machinery. In the name of “scale and intensive farming,” the farms also mandated that farmers buy heavily marked-up and often low-quality seed, fertilizer and farming machinery, all of which had to be purchased directly from the farms themselves. Farmers caught violating the farm’s regulations suffered heavy fines. The farms even took control of the farmers’ finances, borrowing money from banks on their behalf, but imposing their own fees before delivering the money to the farmers. “These were known as ‘prepaid contract costs,’ meaning we had no way to negotiate, even in case of a natural disaster,” said Yang Zhiguo. “Because it was first built by retired generals and soldiers, the Beidahuang area has always had a military-style ethos. Some of the management policies [in the area] are truly unreasonable,” an official from Heilongjiang Reclamation Bureau, who asked not to be named, told NewsChina. “But despite the [rising] contract fees, the farms still cannot afford the huge cost of employees’ social insurance [including that of farmers], and various social infrastructure and services,” he added. Since the late 1990s, however, various domestic media outlets and experts on the Beidahuang system, such as researcher Jiang Wei, have been investigating the methods by which annual contract fees are calculated, but officials have consistently refused to reveal any details. Although administrators argue that the contract fees are determined at staff representative meetings, Jiang Baogui, a member of the petition group of 13 farmers who also acts as one of these representatives, told our reporter that these meetings are entirely ceremonial – over half of those in attendance are government leaders. In recent years, the Beidahuang farms have once again come under fire for their huge expenditure on urbanization, forcing farmers to live in apartments built around farm headquarters, which are generally located far from their farmland. To enable them to access their farms in the area’s cold winters, many farmers have had to buy cars, putting themselves even deeper in debt.
Failed Reform
The increasing burden has provoked more and more farmers to join the group petitioning against the reclamation of their land and the unreasonable charges imposed on them. However, given that Beidahuang has its own independent public security and judicial systems, no department within the system has accepted their petition. When they attempt to take their complaints to higher-level government de-
NEWSCHINA I March 2014
partments or the State Council, they are usually intercepted on the way, and many are detained by the local police. Yang Zhiguo and the other 12 farmers of Daxing Farm thus changed tack, moving to sue the local government who authorized the farms to issue land use permits, in an attempt to circumvent the self-contained Beidahuang bureaucracy. In November last year the local court dismissed the case for the second time, and rejected the farmers’ appeal on the grounds of a lack of evidence, but Yang told NewsChina that he planned to continue appealing, since the land he cultivated is, in his own words, “more important than [his] life.” Yang is not alone. Bo Yi from Qixing Farm, for example, has been petitioning for 17 years, forcing him into bankruptcy and to divorce his wife. Yu Deqing from Longzhen Farm told researcher Jiang Wei that if he could not claim his land back, he would “jump off the Tian’anmen Gate.” According to Jiang Wei, those who refused to pay would be ordered to cease production or even removed from their farm’s employee list, leaving them with no State-recognized identity. “According to Beidahuang’s official website, they are centralizing scattered farmland and family farms for scale and intensive farming, but this does not mean that the [State-owned] farms have the right to ‘merge’ or seize the farmers’ land using their administrative power, as was the norm in the Planned Economy era,” wrote Jiang Wei in his investigative report into the Beidahuang farm system. In fact, as early as 2005, China’s national petition bureau had issued a document warning of the growing number of Beidahuang petitioners, concluding that: “Beidahuang farmers have been given neither the right to use collectively-owned land, nor the freedom to work as they please on the land they have contracted. This is authoritarian and coercive.” In the wake of several field investigations, the government made efforts to reform the system by stripping social functions from the farms and transferring them to neighboring counties, only to find that local governments complained that they could not afford the additional cost. An alternative method would be to reduce administrative bureaucracy by merging similar farms. However, since many farms are under the jurisdiction of different government departments, few are likely to relinquish their vested interests and rights. Now, the Beidahuang farm system remains a tough question, and will be an important test for China’s latest round of reform – two much-vaunted goals of which are the clarification of farmers’ land use rights and the restructuring of SOEs. Given the new leadership’s pledge to deepen reform, it may now be time to test their resolve.
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