Game Analysis During The Process Of Rural Land Expropriation

In China，with the purpose of developing public interest, the government frequentlyturns the collective land into state-owned land and gives farmers who live on these landreasonable compensation in accordance with the law, and this process is called landacquisition. Along with the accelerating pace of industrialization and urbanization recently,agricultural land expropriation become more intensified in the urban fringe and the most partof the rural areas in China. Land acquisition involves many issues such as the land system inChina, the rights and interests of farmers, the compensation for and the purpose of landacquisition and so on, among these issues the interests and contests of different stakeholdersare concealed. With the expanding of the agricultural land expropriation, some irregular actsappeared recently and gave rise to a series of social problems. As a result of it, contradictionsduring agricultural land expropriation have become one of the most important issues for theharmonious development, the stability and the construct of rural society. Agricultural landexpropriation has always been the focus of academic research and fruitful results has beenyielded lately, yet most of the researches focused on the reform of the land requisition system,the social security of the landless peasants and the compensation of land acquisition etc., fewof them studies the specific land acquisition issues from a dynamic perspective.This article is founded on the description of a land requisition event in F Village, Y town,Shandong Province. After getting first-hand materials from interview, participant observation,and other field studies, the author starts the article from the interaction between grass-rootsgovernments, village committees and the landless peasants during this event. Due to thespecific focus on the land requisition event in this thesis, the field is limited to F Village, andthe subjects are limited to the Y town government, the F village committee and the landlesspeasants in F village. The Y town government aims to maintain the social stability andpromote the development of its economy, especially the industrial economy. The main tasksof the F village committee are to help the higher authorities, Y town government, to completethe land acquisition tasks and to maintain the interests of its villagers at the same time. Themain purpose of those landless farmers in F village is to get more compensation from thisland requisition. Thus, the tripartite stakeholders in this event take different strategies basedon different targets. For farmers, the available information resources and economic resources are far less than governmental organizations, thus they are in a passive position during thisprocess and it eventually lead them to a negative attitude towards the land acquisition act.Based on the perspective of social capital, farmers’ possession of material capital, culturalcapital and social networks are far less than those cadres in towns and villages, which meanthat it’s better for them to take defensive and negative behaviors during this process. The Fvillage committee, which is facing the dilemma of supporting the land acquisition ormaintaining its villagers’ interests, chooses to act in concert with the land acquisitionaccording to their own cost-benefit value. Depending on its own resources and institutionaladvantages, the grass-roots governments hold strong positions in this land acquisition.Through the reprocessing of the useful information and the repress of those peasants whorefuse to rent their land, land acquisition was carried out smoothly. As a result, demands ofthe local factory were met and the town’s economy was greatly promoted. Many factors, suchas the defects of the land requisition system, the deviation of their roles for thegrass-governments, over-reliance of the village committees on township governments and thepassive position of the farmers’, contributed to the inequality in this land acquisition event.Measures stated below should be taken to change the government’s strong position andimprove the weak position of farmers in the land requisition: Define the legal rights andobligations of all parties in land acquisition according to the law, set up a solid legal basis andmake sure that all violators are prosecuted properly. The Government must fully recognizetheir own role, reduce the interests in the land acquisition and reform the one-sidedmechanism of checking achievements in someone’s official career. The village committeeshave to straighten out the relationship between itself and the local government and farmersshould establish organizations which represent their own interests to improve their ownrights.