Guangdong farmers wait for the bulldozers amid ambitious new-town plans
Farmersin Guangzhou are forced to move off the land as the province pours billions into ambitious projects to transform poorer regions
The fertile farmland in the Guangdong village of Lubiancun has been left idle since last summer. The bulldozers are coming. But nobody knows exactly when.
Last year the municipal government announced that the whole village - plus the 45-square-kilometre area surrounding it - was going to disappear. The land will be expropriated and developed into a new central area for Qingyuan, a city about 60km from Guangzhou.
Government officials say the new town planned for Qingyuan, which will be built at a cost of 30 billion yuan (about HK$38 billion), will provide homes for 400,000 new residents by 2020.
But Ruan Huiyong and most of the other 300 Lubiancun villagers whose families have worked the land for generations are deeply upset by the prospect of losing their homes.
"I haven't slept well since last year," Ruan said. "I don't want the new town. I just want my farmland. My grandfather left the land to my father, and my father passed it on to me. Now I've nothing to give my children."
He and other villagers have refused to give up their property, even though the village committee has already agreed to the government blueprint.
Villagers protested against the plans at least twice last year in front of the municipal government building, but no one met them to discuss their complaints. Instead, two or three of the residents were detained for 15 days for leading the illegal protest.
For Ruan and his neighbours, the big concerns are the meagre compensation they have been offered and how they will earn a living in the future.
The farmers have been offered a small shop to run as an alternative source of income, as well a flat in the new town. They can move in only when the town is built - and no one knows when that will be.
"I have been a farmer for decades and that's all I know," Ruan said. "We have no idea when the work on the new town will start. All we know is that our farmland has been left uncultivated, so we are forced to live on our savings now."
Yet Ruan and his neighbours are not the only ones fearful of the future. Many other farmers in Guangdong's poorer areas can expect the bulldozers to arrive on their doorstep as the authorities start to build at least a dozen new cities and towns, and hundreds of industrial parks, over the next seven or eight years.
These construction plans are part of an ambitious, five-year effort launched by provincial party chief Hu Chunhua in July last year to modernise the area. The aim is to close the wealth gap between cities in the Pearl River Delta region, which have benefited from a three-decade-long industrial boom, and the poorer rural regions in the province's north, east and west.
Hu plans to spend 672 billion yuan building transportation infrastructure to serve new industrial zones, cities and towns in 12 economically backward cities. It is hoped they can serve as a new engine driving economic development in the province as the delta's export-led industrial region confronts rising costs and declining orders.
He hopes the 12 cities - Qingyuan, plus Meizhou , Maoming , Jieyang , Yangjiang , Shaoguan , Shanwei , Zhanjiang , Chaozhou , Shantou , Yunfu and Heyuan - will have doubled or even trebled their economic output by 2018.
The launch of the plans saw 200 billion yuan spent on various key building projects but one year on, the latest economic data for the 12 cities is not looking so good, with a clear slowdown in business.
The 12 cities reported an average rise in gross domestic product of 9 per cent during the first half - down 1.4 percentage points compared with the same time last year, according to official data. Yu Yunzhou, deputy director of Guangdong's Development and Reform Commission, insists this is still a success.
"You can see the GDP in these 12 cities has grown faster than the average provincial rise of 7.5 per cent," he said. "So it's a very good performance."
But local economic experts said GDP growth rates in the province's north, east and west showed that the market remained cautious. There was little enthusiasm over the region's investment plans because of fears of rising local debt.
"It's unfair to judge the giant five-year plan after only the first year," said Lin Jiang, dean of Lingnan College's public finance and taxation department at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-sen University.
"Yet the GDP figures suggest officials need to realise that the project may not be as effective as they had hoped in terms of the huge fixed investment."
"It's wishful thinking of the authorities to think that private capital will flow in to be used to build hotels, schools, hospitals and commercial real estate projects, then followed by a big migrant population," Lin said. "We've yet to see any rush of money so far."
Lin said the new industrial parks in the 12 cities were designed for hi-tech businesses, which would create jobs, but in reality, they had little advantage over the parks that already existed in the delta region.
Ding Li , an economist at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, is also worried about the lack of outside investment in the roads, new towns and industrial parks.
"If the industrial parks and new towns do not prove a success, then provincial and local taxes - paid by the public - will have to cover these huge losses," Ding said.
Ruan and the other villagers are just as worried. For them the future looks bleak because they won't be farmers any more.