PROMISED LAND

Towering cranes, workers in hard hats—construction sites have become the most recognizable visual shorthand for China’s economic development, and they’re no longer restricted cities or the suburban sprawl. In the countryside,villagers are exercising their “homestead rights”to build homes and mansions for retirement or prestige, or making canny decisions to contract their empty lands or homes to outside investors to develop or run “agri-businesses” like campsites and homestays. But the building frenzy also triggers concern about environmental impact on fragile rural ecosystems, safety hazards from DIY home renovations, land disputes between neighbors,and confusion from villagers used to making autonomous decisions about their own homes.Another clash between tradition and modern values plays out as many married women fight for land rights, medical insurance, and voting rights they lost from their home villages—despite being guaranteed by law—due to sexist notions about a woman’s place of “belonging” after marriage.Despite slim chances of success, and opposition from their neighbors or even their own families,these women hope to prevail, as more local officials and courts also wake up to the problem.

过去二十余年，我国乡村迎来了“建设热潮”，小洋楼、特色民宿和农家乐等如雨后春笋，让乡村面貌焕然一新，然而随之而来，邻里、个人与集体，以及人与自然之间的冲突也在升级。同时，因出嫁而失去原有土地权益的乡村女性正在努力打破陈规，争取平等权利。乡村土地将“权”归何处？

lLLUSTRATlON AND DESlGN BY CAl TAO AND FENGZHENG YlSHENG, PHOTOGRAPHS FROM LONG YUTlNG AND VCG

PAVING PARADISE

China’s rural land is seeing a building boom as villagers exercise their homestead rights—but is it sustainable?

Every weekend, a mere one-hour drive from downtown Chengdu takes Ye Zi and her husband to an alluring mansion of over 200 square meters in Sichuan province, where they live an envious life: chatting with friends under a grapefruit tree, feeding fish in the pond, cooking barbecue in the yard, or just lounging in the beautiful rural surroundings. But this isn’t another “influencer” guesthouse catering to urbanites in a remote village—it’s Ye’s home.

Ye, a 30-year-old engineer who owns an apartment in Chengdu, decided to renovate her family’s ancestral home last September to turn it into a more comfortable space for her aging parents, who haven’t been able to adapt to urban life. “[Our apartment in Chengdu] is less than a hundred square meters. When we close the door, there is no more space for other activities,” explains Ye. “Everyone’s lives are separated; our neighbors don’t know one another.”

As of the end of 2019, China had more than 11 million hectares of“homestead land,” orzhaijidi(宅基地), which is rural land reserved for housing construction. Though a growing number of people are flocking to cities, leaving farmlands empty or repurposed for industry and government construction, there are signs that rural homestead land is coming back to life.

An article last December from the China Report on Agriculture,Rural Areas and Rural Residents, a publication under the Ministry of Agriculture, revealed that while the number of rural permanent residents dropped from 808 million in 2000 to 564 million in 2018, rural housing has grown from over 1.95 million hectares to 2.52 million hectares during that period. Reasons cited include high housing prices in cities, lack of social security and public services, as well as discriminatory education in cities.

Villagers in Fujian province build castlelike mansions as a sign ofsuccess, a tradition known asqidacuo (起大厝,build alargehouse)

The rural construction boom in the last two decades can also be partly explained by the traditional notion of“fallen leaves returning to roots”: the idea that no matter how far a person travels from home, they are obligated to return there before they die. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers from rural regions may spend their entire working lives in cities, yet build a home on their family’s homestead plot for eventual retirement, even if they have to leave the house empty until then. According to a report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’Rural Development Institute, around 10.7 percent of rural homesteads stood empty as of 2018—about 25 million homes.

Other traditional notions, such as a “face” culture that pressures residents of the village to show offtheir achievements in the cities by ostentatious home improvements, and the need to build a home for one’s sons before they marry, also play a role. In addition, for rural families without many assets, a house may be their only collateral for securing a loan. There’s also some time pressure:Before building the house on village land, which is collectively owned, rural residents need to apply for homestead rights from the village itself, which can be rescinded for a variety of reasons including if the applicant leaves the land unused for over two years.

This year, deputy secretary Zhao Lin in Shuangshi village, Sichuan,received about 70 applications for homestead rights. Half of them have been approved. To get approval to build in Zhao’s village, residents need sign-off from two-thirds of the village collective’s members, as well as confirmation from the local department of natural resources that the land will not take up farmland. The applicant also has to get approval from local planning officials on the size, number of stories, and design aesthetic of the house in a process that could take as little as a week or up to three months.

With land becoming more valuable,and migration changing the social cohesion of the village, land disputes have emerged in rural areas. Last year, a three-year-long dispute between neighbors in a village in Putian, Fujian, ended in tragedy when 55-year-old Ou Jinzhong killed two people and injured three more, including two toddlers, in the family next door, then went on the run for a week before committing suicide. The victims’ family had refused to sign off on Ou’s request to rebuild his house after he’d already torn the original house down, and harassed him whenever he tried to start construction, forcing him and his 89-year-old mother to live in a tin shack.

Empty rural housing has attracted investment from outside the villages,which also leads to debate on who ultimately benefits from rural property.In Zhao’s village, there is one house that has been turned into a restaurant by an “outsider.” Zhao believes it helps boost rural development:“When tourists come, they will have more places to go, which could also drive traffic and improve our village’s amenities,” he says.

In southern Anhui province,guesthouse owner Ninglin, who wanted to be identified by just her first name, agrees. “Milan and Shanghai may not need another luxury store,but just one high-end hotel can boost my hometown’s amenities,” she says.The 35-year-old worked as a designer in Shanghai before returning to her hometown in 2018 to take care of her newborn daughter, replacing the earthen-walled farmhouse that was her childhood home with a multi-level guesthouse of tile and stone, which opened for business in 2019.

Uninhabited rural homesareoften converted into homestays,sometimes by the owner but often by outside investors

Since then, around a dozen hotels and guesthouses have opened in the village, which Ninglin believes improves the appearance of the surrounding community. “Some residents will consult us when they want to renovate their house,” she says.“Instead of traditional farmhouses,we now have [houses] with clean yards and flowers, and roads are much cleaner than before and therefore better for receiving tourists.”

Ninglin believes rural hotels are critical to local development. “In most villages across the country, you’ll only find elderly people, but you can’t rely on them to boost the local economy.Rural hotels let people know the village’s existence,” she says. “A lot of rural areas are beautiful, but no one knows about them or goes to them, or if they do go there are no appropriate facilities or accommodation for tourists.” She believes better amenities and business opportunities can also attract young people back into the villages, where most are reluctant to live despite hardships in the city due to a lack of economic and entertainment options.

Lai Wenbo, professor of South China University of Technology,tells TWOC “agritainment”—rural hotels, campsites, and other ways of commercializing homestead rights—is being seized on by village governments and homesteaders themselves as easy ways to make rural areas more dynamic.

The rural construction boom has also brought safety hazards however. Traditionally, homes in the countryside are designed and built by the family themselves,often with the extended family and neighbors pitching in, with little understanding of safety standards,permits, or efficient design. In April,53 people died when an eight-story“self-built” housing block collapsed in a town outside Changsha, Hunan province, triggered by the illegal addition of extra floors. In 2020, a two-story restaurant in a village in Shanxi province collapsed, injuring 28 people and killing 29, due to structural changes from several illegal expansions of the original building.

Aiming to prevent similar tragedies,the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has investigated about 224 million self-constructed structures in 500,000 villages since 2020 and issued notifications to rectify potential hazards. Last December, the Ministry issued guidelines on the safe construction of rural housing and to date has trained more than 40,000 village construction workers in skills a nd safety awareness.

Guesthouses and restaurants around Dali’s Erhai Lake were forced to close by officials concerned about pollution in the lake

Villagers aren’t always cooperative with such efforts. Those with an emotional attachment to their land, or inherited homes from their ancestors,are often reluctant to demolish illegal buildings or rectify their homes according to new standards. Zhao remembers that in August, it took him about two weeks to convince an elderly couple to knock down their illegal construction that exceeded the local homestead standard of 150 square meters, and he had to enlist several influential village elders’ help.“They just stayed inside the house and said, ‘If you knock down the house,you have to bury us in it,’” he recalls.

Zhao estimates that 80 percent of households in his village have taken up more than the local standard of 150 square meters to build their homes. Rather than persuade residents to demolish all of them, they’ve resorted to collecting additional fees for those who exceed their allotted area. “Before they built houses, no one told them [the rules]since the regulations weren’t enforced,and few village officials understood the rules themselves,” he admits. “As long as you were a resident of our village, you could build your house as you wanted.”

Emerging village “agri-businesses”and the construction frenzy they created have other downsides, such as an impact on the fragile infrastructure and natural environment of the village. In 2019, the local government took drastic measures to shut down 1,806 guesthouses, restaurants, and hotels around Erhai Lake in Yunnan province, due to signs of worsening water quality and large outbreaks of toxic blue-green algae. Similarly, in 2019, thousands of agritainment sites around Yangcheng Lake were revealed to be in contravention of sewage treatment regulations.

Some developments are gradually becoming more eco-conscious.Ninglin has installed oil separators and septic tanks for sewage treatment, and her city, Ningguo, has invested over 2.3 million yuan in building sewage treatment facilities and garbage transfer stations in several towns for environmental protection. Lai, who also runs an agritainment business in Huanghua town, Guangdong province, has built a campsite on stilts to reduce damage to the soil,used local construction materials,and retained the natural land with gravel instead of paving it over with concrete.

He believes that the environmental issues caused by agritainment are due to the fact that China’s rural areas still lack sanitation services and public facilities on a par with the cities, forcing people to use diesel for electricity and adopt other inefficient methods. He suggests local governments introduce favorable policies for eco-conscious businesses.“If your guesthouse processes one ton of waste water, then [the government]can cut your [sewage treatment] fees accordingly,” he explains. “Or if your guesthouse does well in sewage treatment and other environmental aspects, then they can reduce some taxes.”

Lai also hopes villagers can get a stake in the building boom, and that it can improve local living standards as a whole. “What we bring [to the village]should make local infrastructure better, and provide rural residents better services like medical care and education, and provide jobs, rather than just occupying and plundering their ecological resources and taking away the money made here,” he says.One of his initiatives in Huanghua town invites college students for a seven-day workshop to provide villagers advice on craftsmanship,safety assessment of their buildings,and various design proposals.

He also plans to transform his own home in rural Hunan province into a non-profit public space, like a senior center or library, which many villages lack. “The most important memories of my life come from village,” he says.“If you improve the condition of a building, you might as well let others use it. Space is only valuable when people begin to use it.”- YANG TlNGTlNG (杨婷婷)

FOR LAND’S SAKE

Struggling against sexist notions, married women try to hold on to their land rights

By day, 35-year-old Long Yuting is a stay-at-home mother for her two children. But after they fall asleep at night, she becomes a legal expert—reading law books and writing civil complaints to get back her dividends,farmland, and other benefits that her village committee has denied her for almost 10 years, ever since they heard she’d gotten married.

Born in a village in Zhaoqing in the southeastern Guangdong province in 1987, Long, like all her neighbors, had been entitled to a piece of the village’s farmland and had paid agricultural tax on it every year. In 1996, the village collective transformed the lands into fishponds operated by a third party, which yield an annual dividend of around 700 yuan per villager (now increased to 6,500 yuan), which Long had been collecting alongside her parents and brothers.

In 2011, Long married a man from another village. When she divorced him two years later, cadres from her own village belatedly became aware of the marriage and decided to strip her of benefits from the village collective. They even reclaimed some dividends they had already paid in the previous two years to rectify their “mistake”—because a married woman, they argue, is not entitled to any further benefits from her birth village.

But this is simply not true under Chinese law—Long had become one of the millions of so-calledchujianü(出嫁女, “married-out women”) in rural China who’ve lost their legal rights from their village after marriage, and one of hundreds of thousands to have taken legal action, sometimes for years, to get back what they are owed.Yet conservative notions, combined with the increasing value of land and a lack of clear rules for enforcing land rights in rural areas, often bring their fights to a dead end.

In the early 1980s, China enacted reforms to replace collective farming.Land was still collectively owned by residents who held a household registration (hukou) in the village,but they were given some autonomy over how to use the plots allocated to them according to the size of the household. Today, the rural collective holds assemblies to decide matters regarding land allocation and landuse, and each member can contract their land to outsiders with agreement from two-thirds of the collective.

The fishponds in Long’s villagebring villagers thousands of yuanper year in dividends

SOME PARTS OF THE COUNTRY WITH THE MOST NUMEROUS AND FIERCEST LAND DISPUTES INVOLVING MARRIED WOMEN ARE ALSO SOME OF THE MOST ECONOMICALLY DEVELOPED, WITH THE MOST VALUABLE LAND.

Legally, a woman with ahukouin the village is automatically a member of the collective and entitled to the same rights as any other villager.However, traditional notions such as“marrying out a daughter is like tossing out a basin of water” hold strong in parts of Chinese society, especially in rural areas. It is widely believed that a woman belongs to her husband’s family after marriage. Regardless of the law, many village collectives consider “married-out women” like Long to have severed ties with their birth village. In many cases, their farmland and residential plots, and other benefits such as rural cooperative medical insurance and voting rights,will be taken back by the village.In recent decades, as China’s economy develops, conflicts over married women’s land rights have intensified. With more and more land being converted by village collectives for business development,or requisitioned by the state for infrastructure and urbanization,questions of who is entitled to get dividends or compensation for the value of the land can spill over into fierce conflicts. A 2014 survey by the All-China Women’s Federation noted an increase of 21 percent in cases of infringement on women’s land rights from 2000 to 2010, with 70 percent of such cases involving married women. Since 2004, Qianqian Law Firm, a Beijing organization that often represents underprivileged women pro bono, has taken part in more than 3,000 disputes involving a total of over 100,000 married women and their children against rural cooperatives.

A village wedding ceremony: Despite Western-style dresses,many traditional elements remain

When a member of the collective loses their rights, their land and dividends can be redistributed among the rest of the villagers. This, in addition to conservative notions, gives villages a huge material incentive to take away land from women who“married out,” and for other villagers to side with the collective in land disputes. Some parts of the country with the most numerous and fiercest land disputes involving married women are also some of the most economically developed, with the most valuable land—a source from Huizhou, the fifth-ranking city in Guangdong province by GDP, tells TWOC that his family is owed 1 million yuan by his mother’s village collective, but they would rather spend 300,000 yuan fighting them in lawsuits rather than give up the land.

Ever since her dividends were repossessed by village cadres,Long has tried to petition higher-level government departments to help her get back her and her parents’dividends. “Why should a woman lose everything just because she is married?” she asks TWOC, repeating the question that has kept her going all these years. “I still live in the village with my family and parents.”

The decision is usually kicked back to the village, with officials citing villages’right to autonomously distribute landuse rights and make other day-to-day decisions on governance. Sometimes,higher authorities are reluctant to help due to sharing the same attitudes towardchujianü. Long recalls that once an official inquired, “Why didn’t you just follow the man you marry?”and suggested that she transfer herhukouto her husband’s village to gain benefits there.

Long says she felt disrespected. “It is like [women] don’t have autonomy to make our own decisions,” she says,adding that she does not want to transfer herhukoubecause she still lives and works in Zhaoqing, and has ever since she graduated from college.

Lin Lixia, a project manager at Qianqian Law Firm who has been working on cases involving women’s land rights for the past two decades, tells TWOC that the traditional expectation that a married woman should move her household registration and draw benefits from her husband’s village contravenes China’s Marriage Law, which guarantees women the right to choose their own place of residence after marriage.But in practice, she has observed that even local officials at higher levels of government might hold similarly conservative views to the village committee, making them dismissive of married women’s petitions and reluctant to intervene.

Like Long, Ma Wenjing from another village in Zhaoqing, now 51 years old, tells TWOC that she has been trapped in a relentless back-andforth process with the village collective,township, and district government departments for over two years over her rural collective membership and dividend rights. Ma married a man in Guangzhou in 1997 and did not move herhukou, as an urban household registration in her husband’s city was too difficult to obtain.

Having already lost her farmland,dividends, and medical insurance due to her marriage, Ma was left with almost nothing at all after she divorced her husband in 2005. Since then, she has petitioned for the rural collective to return her plot so she could farm for a living, but has been rejected. It was not until China reformed its rural collective system in 2019, formalizing the process by which a villager could apply for membership in the collective via what is called a “share certificate,”that Ma decided to take a step forward:requesting higher levels of government to intervene.

EVEN LOCAL OFFICIALS AT HIGHER LEVELS MIGHT HOLD CONSERVATIVE VIEWS, MAKING THEM DISMISSIVE OF MARRIED WOMEN’S PETITIONS AND RELUCTANT TO INTERVENE.

The township government held a hearing for her, in which they turned down Ma’s request, saying the villagers had autonomy to decide their own land allocations. Ma then appealed to the district government, which ordered the township government to reconsider their decision. This process was repeated three times before the township government eventually agreed to confirm Ma’s membership of her village collective. “It feels like I am always going round in circles and I never make any progress beyond the village and township level,” she says, “I have so little power in this.”

More than 1,100 kilometers away, in Xiangyang, Hubei province, 42-yearold Zhang Zhi’ai has been facing a similar buck-passing process since she started to petition for her land expropriation compensation. In 2018,the local government announced it would reappropriate the lands in Zhang’s village to build roads.The village committee decided to exclude allchujianüfrom receiving compensation, including Zhang, who got married in 2015. Zhang estimates she will lose around 100,000 yuan in compensation under the arrangement.Since then, Zhang has called on the district, municipal, and provincial Women’s Federation and government departments to help, but all cited the village’s right to autonomous governance as the reason why they couldn’t intervene, and advised her to take her case to court. When she did so, the court first dismissed her case then ruled against her, stating she is not qualified to get compensation as she does not rely on the farmland for her livelihood, having moved away to the city to find work like many young people in China’s rural areas today.

After 10 years of legal action, Long has assembled a large dossier of petitions,lawsuits, ID, and other legal documents

Zhang calls the decision “absurd” and discriminatory against women: “Ninety percent of the young men in our village do not live on farmland today, either,”she claims. “Even the village head himself doesn’t farm anymore. Why should they get compensation?”

Numbers collected by Qianqian Law Firm show that the chances of achujianüwinning a lawsuit to regain her rights are fairly low. Among the 221 suits involving the land-use and other rights of married women that the firm took on in 2018, nearly 50 percent of them were dismissed, while the court ruled against the plaintiffs in 40 percent of cases.

In Zhang’s case, as in many others,the lawsuit was dismissed because the plaintiff usually has to prove their membership in the rural collective.Currently, there are no clear legal criteria for membership. Even when a “married-out” woman successfully proves her membership, like Long finally did in 2015, the village might still refuse to pay dividends. Long has had to file a lawsuit every time the village makes a dividend allocation—so far, she has filed five lawsuits for herself and her parents, a process that takes about six months every time.

Land disputes can pit married women as well as their children against their neighbors and even other family members

Apart from administrative and legal hurdles, many women fighting for their land rights also encounter hostility from their fellow villagers. Long tells TWOC that ever since she started to argue for her dividends, she has been ostracized by the entire village, receiving dirty looks from her neighbors and accusations that she is a “beggar” or “grubbing for money.” She alleges that when the village underwent property rights reform in 2019, the village committee seized her parents and brother’s share certificates to punish her.

Ma says that her neighbors coldshouldered her at a village assembly,and they’ve directed a loudspeaker at her door to play messages to harass her. After the township government affirmed her membership in the village collective in September, the village committee filed a counter-suit to overturn the decision. “They said they would fight me till the very end with the strength of the entire village,” Ma recalls. Even her parents and siblings condemned her for harming their reputation, and have stopped seeing her. “I ended up being a loner, isolated and forsaken by everyone,” Ma says.

Despite these difficulties, the issue of married women’s rights has gained widespread public sympathy, leading to some positive changes. On October 30, China’s top legislature passed a revision of the women’s protection law with new provisions on rural women’s property rights, such as stating that courts are obligated to accept lawsuits filed by women who find their property rights infringed. A new law regulating rural economic collectives is also currently being drafted, which Lin says could provide clear, nationwide rules on defining membership in the collective, as well as how local governments and courts should handle cases involving the rights of married women.

Some local governments and courts are also adopting more active measures. For example, the Panyu district government and court in Guangzhou have imposed measures such as fines, detention, and credit blacklists for village heads to force them to distribute dividends tochujianüand their children.

Long, Ma, and Zhang are also continuing to fight, though many other married women they know have given up due to the expensive, timeconsuming legal actions, and the slim chances of success. Long tells TWOC that she has only managed to win back 3,800 yuan in total after all these years,despite all her effort and mental stress.But for her, these actions are more about winning equity than getting material compensation.

“These are the legal rights that I am supposed to have,” she says. “Why would I give them up?”