Chinese Lawyer Receives Death Threats for Defending Land Grab Victims

An April 3, 2011 text message on lawyer Shu Xiangxins cell phone says: You will lose your job in 15 days and experience living in fear." (Courtesy of Shu Xiangxin)

Shus clients, however, were meanwhile able to successfully negotiate with Guan County officials to keep their farmland.

The case has created quite a public stir in the area, and many other villagers have since gone to Shu for legal help.

But the case also alarmed higher-up authorities in Shandong Province according to Shu. On June 8, officers from the Jinan Public Security Bureau took Shu away for interrogation while he was attending his nieces wedding banquet. Police also took away all the files from his office, basically shutting him down.

We could no longer take on any cases, so my colleagues all quit, Shu said.

However, Guan County authorities continued to seize farmland in other places. During the night of Aug. 8, the county mayor sent crews to dig up more than 300 mu (49 acres) of farmland, with crops ready for harvest within just a month, in two villages. And on Aug. 14, many homes in one village were forcibly demolished.

Shu has meanwhile written a letter to local officials asking for a compromise with the authorities in the hope of getting his license back. He said he is still holding on to his law firm, although he is losing money, while waiting for a response from the authorities.

According to a report by Chinas Ministry of Land and Resources, nearly 10,000 cases of illegal land confiscation by local gove! rnment o fficials occurred in the first quarter of 2011 alone.

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Prominent Chinese economist and commentator He Qinglian said in a Dec. 2010 blog that never in history have Chinese farmers been in such a vulnerable situation as local government can expropriate any resource from their farmland. Local governments constantly mobilize police and gangsters to seize land from farmers who lack the power to defend their land, which has become officials golden goose, He said.

Revenues from land sales in 2010 were 2.7 trillion yuan (approx. US$410 billion), accounting for 7.3 percent of Chinas GDP, according to data published by the Ministry of Land and Resources.

Read the original Chinese article.