He Xiawei felt little excitement about new measures to give farmers rights to trade and mortgage their residential land, expected to be endorsed by Communist Party leaders over the weekend at the Central Committee plenum.
Mr He's house was one of hundreds in Shengzhuang village, under Yixing city's jurisdiction in Jiangsu , demolished by local officials last December to make way for guest houses and shops.
Mr He refused to sign the contract to hand his house and residential land over to the village committee, but his home was torn down anyway. The farmer and 250 other householders from the village posted a petition online calling for protection and permanent ownership by farmers of their residential land.
The petition was one of several circulated online by farmers last year calling for the privatisation of rural land on the grounds that the current household responsibility system does not protect their land from being seized by local officials. The wave of petitions from four provinces has been widely reported by overseas media, but peasant leaders who signed them were either detained or warned by local officials not to talk.
Mr He said the demolition continued after their petition went online. The villagers also sued to try to stop the demolition, but the court ruled the demolition was lawful.
More than half of the arable land in the village was also taken by the village committee to build houses to relocate displaced farmers - even though mainland law forbids the acquisition of farmland for non- agricultural use.
