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	90,000 "mass incidents" a year in China over land disputes by Reuters & agencies   Nov 2011   South Chinese villagers wielding clubs and stones attacked an industrial park, incensed by reports that an official had sold land without compensating them, media reports said in the latest flare-up over commercial development.   The riot broke out in Zhongshan in Guangdong province, where rice paddy land has given way to factories that make many of China"s exports.   Authorities said the violence was quelled by police who took away suspected organisers. The Zhongshan police said the dispute over the land had festered since August.   Caixin Magazine, a Chinese business journal, reported that the dispute was sparked by complaints that officials had illicitly sold off land without paying residents proper compensation.   Villagers had begun patrols to "prevent employees of the developer concerned from going to work".   In China, most rural land is officially under village collective ownership, but in reality government officials control its development, leading to frequent disputes over land control, compensation with widespread charges of cronyism and corruption between officals and business interests.   Local protests are common in China. In September, thousands of villagers in Lufeng, another part of Guangdong province, rioted and ransacked government offices, protesting against land requisitions by corrupt officials.   Earlier this year, Zhou Ruijin, a former deputy editor-in-chief of the official party newspaper, the People"s Daily, said there had been more than 90,000 "mass incidents" -- a term for protests and demonstrations -- every year from 2007 to 2009.   A recent poll found disputes over land acquisitions had reached a new peak amid rampant development and were a leading cause of rural clashes across China.   Deep inequalities remain in China with hundreds of millions of predominantly rural peasants living on less than $2-5 a day.   September 25, 2011 (NYT)   Protestors in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong have besieged government buildings, attacked police and overturned riot squad vehicles during protests against the seizure of farmland.   The protests continued on Friday, with farmers gathered in front of a government building banging gongs and holding signs saying "give us back our farmland" and "let us continue farming", Reuters reported.   The violence was the latest outbreak of civil unrest fuelled by popular discontent over land grabs that leave peasants with little or no compensation.   Such "mass incidents", as the government calls them, have been increasing in recent years, providing party leaders with worrisome proof that official malfeasance combined with a dysfunctional judiciary often has combustible results.   According to a recent study by scholars at Nankai University in Tianjin, there were 90,000 such episodes in 2009, a figure that includes melees and mass petition campaigns by people seeking justice. Government censors often try to make sure such events stay off the internet and out of newspapers.   Earlier this month, hundreds of residents protesting against environmental contamination by a solar panel factory in Zhejiang province stormed the factory and destroyed equipment and vehicles. Weeks earlier, 12,000 people peacefully gathered in the city of Dalian to demand the closure of a chemical factory.   In Lufeng, the protests were the most dramatic manifestation of a long-running battle over land. According to a local website, the Lufeng city government has sold more than 300 hectares of property for industrial parks and high-priced housing. The proffered compensation, villagers say, has been barely enough to buy a new bed.   Municipal governments, which own all land in China, largely depend on sales of property leases to prop up their budgets. The latest seized plots were sold to a development company for 1 billion yuan ($A160 million), according to The South China Morning Post.   News and images of the demonstrations were quickly deleted by censors. One showed demonstrators carrying a banner that read "give back my ancestors farmland".   Mi Yushan, Ningxia Province   "The wealth gap is certainly unfair! The price of chemical fertiliser is increasing but the price at which we can sell grain has dropped.   We farmers have few fields. We have just enough food so that we don"t get hungry - but we have little money left over. We have to work as temporary labourers in the town to earn money.   Someone from Hebei province tried to buy our land a few years ago, and the government just closed their eyes so we had to buy it back ourselves."   Yao Min, Guizhou Province   "Both our children have left the village to work in the cities. The central government leaders just care about themselves - not about the masses, not about the people.   The local officials only pay attention to the one child policy, so that they can collect fines from those who have more than one child.   If families don"t have enough money to pay, they take things from their houses. If we become sick this will be a disaster for the family."   Wang Ran, Guizhou Province   "The agricultural tax is high. Government officials say they are going to reduce the rural taxes, but they haven"t and we don"t know when they will.   If they did reduce our taxes, that would really change our lives. We are so poor because there is no development here.   The government does give aid but for some reason there is hardly any allocated to this area. I have no way to buy fertilizer. We need economic help."
	"First world debt crisis": ignoring lessons of history by Jubilee Network Australia   We often hear and are led to believe that we are powerless to impact the system – how things are decided and the way things are done in our world.   But we are also in amazing and implausible times. The Arab Spring has shown us that sometimes right beats might. Occupy Wall Street protests are confronting the mightiest of the mighty with the simplest of messages: the status quo is unfair and unacceptable; we’re not leaving til you fix it. Injustice and inequity are becoming downright unfashionable! It’s a time that seems to have enormous potential.   Debt cancellation for the poorest countries was at one time the preserve of radicals, dismissed by governments and international institutions alike. Only mass public pressure had the power to force debt cancellation onto the mainstream agenda and eventually into international policy.   The leaders of the nations comprising the G-20 have just concluded their gathering in Cannes, France for the annual meeting. There were two topics on the table for discussion that Jubilee has worked very hard, in concert with others, to bring from obscurity into the fore: Ending Tax Haven Secrecy.   Last week the G20 named 11 tax havens. While they continue to ignore that the biggest tax havens are in the G8 countries (especially London), this crucial issue is growing in profile and we are making significant progress on what seemed an impossible task.   Financial Transactions Tax   Outrightly dismissed not so long ago as economically irresponsible and politically unfeasible, after last week''s G20 meeting the FTT has no more opponents in the eurozone, and these supporters are joined by Brazil and Argentina, South Africa, the African Union, Ethiopia, and Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General. Whilst not yet supportive, President Obama agreed the financial sector must contribute more to the cost of the crisis.   The times do genuinely seem to have enormous potential – let’s keep our leaders on their toes to make sure it’s not opportunity squandered.   Jun-2011   "First world debt crisis": ignoring lessons of history.   The global financial crisis or the “credit crunch” as it has been labelled has sent shock waves around the world. Plunging share prices and record market lows have many analysts convinced that a US and European recession is virtually assured.   The chaos in financial markets has been explained as a lack of credit available to banks on the international markets. Inject liquidity, restore lenders’ confidence to start lending again, and everything will come right. Hence the $700 billion US bail out.   But is this really about lack of credit, or about massive over-accumulation of debt? Driven by greed, many of the largest and oldest investment banks in the world embarked on irresponsible and reckless lending practices in the sub-prime mortgage market, giving loans to people with no capacity to repay their debt. Using a complicated web of financial instruments, these debts were repackaged and resold onto brokers and investors around the world.   The crisis of debt in the North bears frightening resemblance to the debt crisis that poor countries have faced since the early 1980s. Today developing countries’ debt stocks stands at a staggering US$2.9 trillion and every day the poorest countries pay the rich world almost $100 million in debt repayments.   But compare and contrast how developing countries are treated by rich governments to how international banks are being treated. The former are told to get their house in order before they receive financial support.   Meanwhile they are left paying. The latter are being bailed out with incomprehensible sums. And where are the conditionalities to these bail outs?   The current crisis provides an opportunity for these issues to come centre stage.   May-2011   European debt crisis urges a reexamination of sovereign debt management.   As a series of bailout packages have been negotiated with Greece, Ireland and soon Portugal, it is time to examine the global orthodoxy in dealing with debt. In mid-May a bailout, expected to equal approximately €80 billion, with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, is set to be agreed upon with Portugal.   The package will see ordinary people bear the greater burden of reform as a program of shock therapy, involving large spending cuts, tax increases and labour market reforms, is introduced. Those banks largely responsible for the reckless private lending which spawned the current crisis are set to be the largest benefactors.   Increasing resistance to the bailouts has been felt across Europe as nationals express their opposition to paying for the excesses of their banking elite. In Iceland, voters recently rejected a government-backed deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands following the collapse of Icelandic banks in 2008. The decision will not be without consequence for the country, which faces an impending court case by the UK and the Netherlands, the potential block to its bid to join the European Union and a lowering of its credit rating on international markets.   In Greece, hundreds of academics, politicians and activists have called for a debt audit commission to examine the legitimacy of the country’s debt, in the hope of holding to account those responsible.   The European debt crisis points to a greater systemic problem of dealing with debt. Across the Global South, the IMF has repeatedly negotiated ‘emergency’ packages, which have seen foreign banks bailed out, while the governments themselves spiral down deeper into debt, at great cost to citizens who had nothing to do with causing the crisis. The European crisis is an opportunity for leaders to challenge the global mechanism for dealing with debt. Visit the related web page
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