Chen Ruiyan on Rural Home Construction

Chen Ruiyan, “Why is it So Hard for Farmers to Build Houses?”[1]
 
Introduction by David Ownby

Introduction
 
Chen Ruiyan is a doctoral candidate in the China Rural Governance Research Center at Wuhan University, and has recently been engaged in fieldwork on the problem of home construction in wealthy villages in Zhejiang.  She penned the text translated here in response to a grisly murder growing out of a housing dispute in Fujian.
 
On October 10, 2021, a farmer named Ou Jinzhong, from Putian, Fujian, hacked to death two of his neighbors and injured three others because of a long-standing quarrel between Ou and neighboring families that had prevented him from building a new home, which meant that he had been living in a tin shack for some years—next to the much flashier homes of the neighbors.  Ou subsequently committed suicide to avoid being arrested by authorities.
 
The point of Chen’s article is to point out that the conflict behind the violence in Fujian is by no means unique.  Such conflicts are instead extremely common, especially along China’s developed east coast, where economic development and generally dense populations put pressure on land and housing and make renewal of the housing stock extremely difficult.
 
The problems are multiple and look to be intractable.  Village land in China is collectively owned (except for the parts that are state-owned), but “homestead allocations” allow families to build private dwellings and to some extent can be bought and sold (the author is not completely clear on this point, presumably because the situation on the ground is extremely complex).  However, many farmers refuse to sell their “allocations” or the structures that are on them, because prices are going up, so that an abandoned, uninhabited ancestral abode can be viewed as the goose than may well lay the golden egg at some future date.  Those who are refusing are generally those who are living elsewhere—sometimes elsewhere in the village, sometimes elsewhere in China or the world—while those wanting to buy the dilapidated structures are those whose houses are next to their own collapsing structures, and they need that land or that allocation to replace their current dwellings, which are often dilapidated to the point of being dangerous. 
 
At the same time, the Chinese state is hoping to impose a certain uniformity on the next generation of village Chinese home construction, and thus attempts to enforce something like a building code, which often winds up being another obstacle for village dwellers with limited means and options.  Local cadres wind up spending vast amounts of time mediating between unhappy relatives and neighbors, and then attempting to enforce government regulations once construction becomes possible, which often enflames relationships between cadres and farmers.  It does not help that village solidarity, already threatened by the many changes of the 20th century, has almost completely collapsed in the face of ubiquitous market forces.
 
The text serves as a powerful reminded of the enduring problem of relative poverty discussed by the sociologist Li Qiang in a text available elsewhere on this site. 
 
Translation by Selena Orly
 
Recently, the case of Ou Jinzhong 欧金中, who hacked his neighbors to death over a housing dispute in Putian, Fujian, has aroused widespread concern from throughout society, and public opinion continues to ferment.
 
According to media reports, the following is a brief overview of the events:
 
Ou Jinzhong, a farmer from Shanglin Village in Putian, has been unable to build a new house for five years because he has been blocked by a neighbor, a situation which obliged him to live a tin hut. On October 10th, a sheet of tin from Ou’s house blew onto the neighbor’s vegetable field, which led to another dispute.  Giving in to the feelings generated by years of injustice, Ou ran to the neighbor's house in a fit of anger and attacked the neighbor and his family members, killing two and injuring three.
 
Because of Ou Jinzhong’s image of an “honest person" and the fact that his housing difficulties are in a sharp contrast with the victim's flashy three-story house, netizens generally believe that this incident is a tragedy caused by social injustice, and that Ou Jinzhong himself is to be pitied. According to the latest reports from the Putian police, at about 3:00 p.m. on October 18, Ou Jinzhong, surrounded by members of the public security bureau and the People’s Armed Police, "resisted arrest and attempted to commit suicide" in a cave near the village, and died after being sent to the hospital.
 
Setting aside the seriousness and ugliness of this particular incident, its background actually reflects widespread problems of rural homesteads and rural housing construction.
 
In the rural areas of China’s economically developed east coast, farmers, like Ou Jinzhong, who are unable to build houses for years and have housing difficulties, are by no means rare.  Disputes between neighbors and relationship conflicts caused by house-building problems are daily occurrences. In other words, the Putian incident reveals the dilemma of the difficulty of home-building in rural areas, and this dilemma has a certain universality.
 
When I was doing research in S Village in Zhejiang Province this summer (note: the names of people and villages in this article are all aliases), I heard many such stories. Home building is the thing that local village cadres and villagers most care about and which gives them the greatest headaches, and everyone in the village is quite riled up about it.
 
Rural Households Facing Housing Difficulties
 
Because they have problems building houses and wind up in problematic housing situations, this group of farmers is known as "households facing housing difficulties 住房困难户" in the local administrative system. There are more than ten such households in S Village. Some of their situations are as follows:
 
Yu Jun 俞军, 68, began in 2014 to apply to the village for an allotment that would allow him to build a new house, and received permission in 2016, but almost six years later, the house has not yet been built. Yu Jun's village household has ten members: Yu Jun and his wife, two daughters and sons-in-law, and four grandchildren.
 
The house in which they are currently living is an old two-story house with 30 square meters of living space, which was originally built as part an old-fashioned  Hui-style courtyard, which is more than two hundred years old. The outer courtyard wall has cracks and the internal wooden structure has been eaten away by termites. Cadres have nailed a number signs on the gate warning of danger. Yu Jun says that many of the wooden beams in the house have also suffered termite damage, and there is a risk of collapse at any time. Since returning to the village in 2014, Yu Jun has tried various ways to build his house. Looking at the half-built house he has managed to construct, he is struck dumb with anger.
 
Yu Gentian 俞根田, who will turn 70 this year, has been applying to build a new house for more than ten years. His situation is similar to that of Yu Jun, in that he was identified as household facing housing difficulties in 2013, and in 2015 he received an allotment to build a house, but the house has not yet been built. There are six people in Yu Gentian's family: Yu Gentian and his wife, his son's family of three, and a divorced daughter who returned home, but the house in which they are living is an old two-story house of only 30 square meters, and his son and daughter-in-law have been forced rent a house in Hangzhou. The house’s wooden structures have also been eaten away by termites and is not secure against the wind.  It has been identified as a dangerous house by authorities.
 
Yu Fugui 俞富贵, 56, and his wife have accumulated a sum of money after years of hard work and want to build a new house in the village. His son is 30 years old, and has been discussing marriage with his girlfriend for five or six years, but the marriage has been put off because Yu Fugui's family does not have a new house. Like Yu Jun, the family lives in a small 30-square-meter house in the middle of an old housing structure. It is not cost-effective to buy a house in town, and they cannot afford to buy a house in the city, so his son and girlfriend have to rent somewhere else in the village. Yu Fugui says helplessly: "Waiting for a miracle is all I can do."
 
The real dilemma faced by these households with housing difficulties is very clear, and the need to build houses is equally clear and urgent, but the houses just cannot be built. However, the paradox is that everyone fails to build a house for a different reason.
 
This is in turn related to the complex web of personal interests, social relations, and institutional settings of rural homesteads, and disputes with neighbors are only one outcome of this complex set of relations.
 
Why Can’t Farmers Get their Houses Built?
 
Rural housing construction involves the use of homestead allocations and agricultural land, both of which are material expressions of social relations, institutional policies, and economic interests, and are particularly important in developed areas. Therefore, how farmers in a particular place go about building houses is influenced and constrained by various factors, such the legal system, local history and culture, village economic interests, and village social relations, which can all lead to difficulties in getting houses built.
 
The Home Construction System in the Villages
 
In order to establish regulations and maintain order in the use of rural homesteads, as well as to avoid wasteful use of land, and to maintain the national threshold of 1.8 billion mu of arable land, relevant policy documents were issued across the country in 2014, after which farmers had to abide by these laws and regulations when building houses.  From an institutional point of view, there are currently three ways for farmers to build houses:
 
The first  is to tear down and rebuild on the same site 原拆原建, which means to build a new home on the same site with the same dimensions as the original structure. That means that the size of the homestead and the number of floors of the new house have to be the same as the original, and only the style can be changed.
 
The second is to tear down and reconstruct 拆翻建, which means to build a bigger or smaller house on the original site.  For example, if the original farmer’s homestead was only 30 square meters, and the house has only one floor, but the farmer wants to build a new 90-square-meter two-story building on the same site, this belongs to category of tear down and reconstruct.
 
The third is the construction of a new house in a different location 异地建新, which means the construction of a new house on a new homestead. After the new house is built, the old house must be demolished, according to the regulation concerning “one house per family 一户一宅.”
 
The three ways of house building respond to different conditions, and the ease or difficulty of applying and getting approval vary considerably.  Tear down and rebuild is the easiest, and all you need to do is to explain the urgency of the situation and get a consent letter from four neighbors.  Because you are tearing down and rebuilding on the same original site, it is relatively easy to obtain the neighbors’ consent.  The next easiest is tearing down and remodeling.  The difficulty here is that you are proposing to change the size and/or height of the house. Of course, there is not much problem is you want to decrease the size of your house, but when they tear down and remodel, what farmers generally want to expand the square footage and increase the height of their dwelling.
 
The problem with expanding the surface area is whether there is enough room for expansion around the farmer’s original house, whether the expansion will infringe on someone or require the purchase someone else’s old house, whether the expansion will affect the entry and exit or otherwise inconvenience the surrounding neighbors.  Building a taller house might affect the amount of light neighboring houses receive. In places where people live very close together, factors like occupying other people’s land, affecting the light neighbors receive, hindering their entry and exit, and even customary considerations like fengshui, all can make it very difficult to procure the neighbors’ signatures that are necessary before beginning to build. 
 
Building a new house in a different location is the most difficult of the three. Farmers generally choose to build a new house in a different location because the old house cannot be demolished and all they can do is apply to the village committee for a new homestead construction allotment.  There are two difficulties with building a new house in a different location: one is applying for permission to convert agricultural land into homestead land, which is a change in the nature of the land category; the second is that farmers need to locate one entire plot of agricultural land that can be used as a homestead, that is, land that village regulations have defined as agricultural land that can be used for homestead purposes, and not agricultural land that must be preserved for agricultural purposes.
 
Since most of land designated as agricultural land is allocated to individuals as part of the responsibility system, if a farmer who wants to build a house does not himself have sufficient land, he or she must acquire general agricultural land that can be used for home building purposes through exchange or purchase. The current problem is that, on the one hand, authorities do not frequently allow the transfer of land status from agricultural to homestead, and at the same time, agricultural land that at one time was available for building houses in the villages has been largely exhausted. Yu Gentian was unable to find such land, which meant that, despite having received his allotment, he has not been able to build his house.
 
In addition, because the government wants to standardize house construction in the villages, unify the layout of the home design, and economize on land resources, when farmers want to build houses the authorities will provide them with certain models, requiring them to build according to four or eight regulations. If they don’t follow the model the construction will be deemed not up to spec. This is the problem that Yu Jun ran into. When Yu Jun built a house he decided to try his luck, and exceeded by 20 square meters the surface area he was permitted, and this excess part had to be demolished because it does not conform to the regulations of the government model. This is the key reason why Yu Jun's house has not yet been completed.
 
Lineage History and Ancestral Culture
 
S Village is a single-surname village, and almost all of the villagers are surnamed Yu. The history of the Yu surname in the local area can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty. There is Yu ancestral hall in the village where one can find a complete genealogy of the lineage. The depth of lineage history and culture influences the way farmers currently build houses in two ways:
 
One is that the old houses are hard to split up.  Historically, these old houses were owned by family units, the idea being that four generations would live together, sisters together with sisters-in-law.  The head of the family controlled the distribution rights of the entire household, while individual families only enjoyed the right to occupy certain rooms, and the courtyard belonged to the entire family.  Today, however, individual families have gradually separated from the family unit, and large families have disintegrates, meaning that housing is now based on nuclear families. In the last round of redistribution, individual families were granted ownership rights to the rooms in the old homes. But the houses themselves, as objective symbols of the old family system, cannot be split up that easily even if people want to split them up.
 
The 30-square-meter house owned by Yu Jun is located in the middle of seven rooms which are part of the courtyard of the old family dwelling. The rooms connected to it on the left and right are owned by others and so Yu cannot simply tear down his house and rebuild.  His third elder brother, on the other hand, received a room on the east side of the house, the demolition of which did not affect the main body of the house, so he has already torn down and rebuilt. Yu Jun originally planned to buy all of the properties remaining in the old courtyard, and then tear down and rebuild, because all of the other six households that owned those properties have either bought houses or built new houses, leaving the old properties abandoned and unoccupied.  But those families could not be convinced to sell, and because of this, Yu Jun could only choose to build a new house in a different location.
 
When farmers want to build new houses they are faced with a dilemma like that of Yu Jun. As one family system gives way to another, house ownership becomes unclear and changes in property rights can be chaotic, giving rise to various family conflicts and relationship disputes which are hidden within issues of houses and home construction.
 
Second is the farmers' view of ancestral property.  Many of the houses in S Village are hundreds of years old, and for the villagers they symbolize the history of the family and the memory of their ancestors, and hence are sacred and inviolable ancestral properties. When villagers view their old houses through the lens of ancestral property, it discourages some of them from tearing them down and rebuilding. As a result, many old houses in the village have been deserted and uninhabited for many years, but the homesteads cannot be vacated and the phenomenon of “one family, many houses” becomes widespread.
 
What Happens When a Homestead is Seen as a Property Asset
 
Under the framework of China's land system, rural homesteads have three attributes.
 
The first is a welfare attribute. Rural land is collectively owned and as long as peasants remain recognized members of rural collectives, they enjoy the right to the free supply of residential land to meet their needs in terms of housing security.
 
The second is a resource attribute. Land is a scarce resource and the basis of people’s production and life. In order to maintain the threshold of 1.8 billion mu of arable land in China, the state strictly supervises land use. Therefore, the approval of quotas for urban and rural construction are both subject to a unified state allocation.
 
The third is a property attribute, i.e., homesteads and houses have economic value, they are assets. When the scarcity of land resources is superimposed on economic effects and farmers’ strong demand to build houses, the asset attribute of homesteads and land stands out clearly.
 
Due to economic development, road construction, and industrial expansion in developed coastal areas such as Zhejiang and Fujian, a large amount of land has been expropriated for development, especially in a context where there are many mountains and many people and not much land.  Land resources are highly strained, which highlights the value of land.  Homesteads are in great demand and are very expensive, meaning that their property attributes stand out all the more clearly.  Therefore, farmers will not lightly give up the ownership of their homesteads, and will instead try to wring more profits out of them. The villagers who own the old houses are not willing to sell their homesteads to others even if the houses are abandoned and falling apart. “I don’t want to sell and that’s it, I don’t need a reason.  The others can just wait.”
 
When the land is tied to obvious economic interests, a few mu of land will lead to conflicts and disputes between villagers, as in the Putian incident, where the dispute over ten square meters of land between Ou Jinzhong and the injured party led to a bloodbath. Growing awareness of the asset nature of homesteads has strengthened farmers' sensitivity to private property rights in homesteads, which in turn has led to increased difficulty in negotiations when farmers seek to build houses.
 
Divided Villages and Disintegrating Societies
 
Disputes over house building have long been a part of daily life in rural villages, but traditionally there was a sort of internally generated public order in the villages, which provided a set of mechanisms for resolving contradictions and disputes. Village cadres, elders, or capable people who could represent the village’s common interest would come forward, law down the law, and reason with everyone, so that both parties to the dispute would take a step back and look at things from a broader perspective. Eventually, the conflict would be reconciled and the relationship between the two sides repaired.
 
After reform and opening, the rural areas in the eastern coastal region were the first to be affected by the market economy, and the close social relations among villagers rapidly fell apart, leading to the disintegration of village communities. Even clan-based villages with centuries of history did not escape this fate. The peasants are now linked to the market society on an individual basis, economic polarization has come to the villages, money has replaced blood ties as the principle that rules the village, self-interest has displaced public interest, and the authority of the elders has been challenged. Village consensus is hard to find, and it is difficult to mediate conflicts and disputes between villagers.
 
This is what led to the absurd story that when Yu Jun was trying to build his house, his own nephew was unwilling to sell him the old house he needed, while a neighbor coldly told him, “What do I care if your house falls down?  I’ve got a house to live in.” Yu Jun said that the only way to solve the problem of the old houses in the village is to wait for the government to come up with policy, the only way to tear down and rebuild the houses legally. It is impossible to solve the housing problem through negotiation with neighbors or exchanges with relatives.
 
The same thing happened this year when the farmer Yu Tianshui was getting ready to build a house. He chose to tear down and remodel, and the formalities were completed and everything was approved. But when he started to build the house, a neighbor filed a complaint and phoned the authorities to report on Yu Tianshui, which brought construction to a halt. The problem was eventually resolved after repeated mediation by village cadres. The reason for this incident is that four years before, when the neighbor had wanted to widen his house by ten centimeters by occupying public land, Yu Tianshui had refused to sign the consent letter. So when Yu Tianshui started building his house, his neighbors complained frequently about him.
 
Because of house building, conflicts between cadres and groups of villagers, neighbors and brothers, often occur in S Village. The Putian Ou Jinzhong incident is an extreme version of these stories.
 
Old houses are not demolished, there are no homesteads or allotments for building new houses, neighbors report on one another, houses are not built according to spec, government policy changes, the state needs a certain amount of arable land…All of this means that farmers who want to build houses cannot do so.
 
This seemingly simple issue of rural house building is embroiled, on the micro level, with family systems and village community relations, and, on the macro level, with the state system and legal issues. It is this convergence of history and contemporary reality, this competition between the system and human nature, that finally created the unfortunate situation encountered by many individuals. This is the predicament of Yu Jun, the predicament of Ou Jinzhong, and the predicament faced by the majority of households with housing difficulties.
 
Attributing the farmers' housing dilemma simply to the inaction of grassroots cadres and a bureaucratic system is a refusal to engage with the complex reality of village society. Oversimplifying  this complex reality or understanding it from a purely emotional perspective will not help solve the real problems.
 
Consequences of the Home-Building Difficulties Farmers Face and Suggestions for Managing Them
 
Due to the complex situation of institutional and social relations embedded in rural homesteads and farmers’ house building, difficulties in the developed coastal areas have led to many social consequences:
 
First is that the housing difficulties and needs of the households with housing difficulties are dragging on without resolution.  Second are the waste of land resources, the impossibility of demolishing old houses, the inability to free up the resources represented by the homesteads, and the squeeze on new allocations for construction land.  Third is that the situation leads to social tensions in villages, mutual distrust among neighbors, suspicions among brothers, suspicions among cadres, and a sense of resentment in the villages.  Fourth is the dilemma of grassroots governance. The mediation of housing disputes is the most troublesome work for village and township officials. When village officials do not succeed in their mediation efforts, farmers often file petitions to complain.  This often starts with the neighbors, but then the farmers hoping to build a house file a petition as well. Some farmers even call the 12345 hotline and file reports on themselves in order to attract attention, causing headaches for grassroots officials.
 
In order to seek out a solution to the problem of farmers' demands to build houses, many places throughout the country have now carried out pilot projects for homestead reforms, and I have a few suggestions in this context.
 
First is to strengthen the legal perspective farmers’ that rural homesteads are collectively owned by the farmers.  According to the Land Management Law, according to the nature of land ownership, land can be divided into state-owned land and land collectively owned by the farmers. Article 10 of the Constitution stipulates: "The land in rural and suburban areas is collectively owned, unless it is otherwise designated as state-owned; homesteads, as well as land and mountains reserved for individual use, are also collectively owned." This is the legal basis for homestead reform.  Farmers should abide by the Constitution, Land Management Law, and other regulations on homestead ownership. Any attempt to occupy homesteads and refuse to relinquish them on the basis that they are private property is illegal.  Reinforcing farmers' awareness of the law that “rural homesteads are collectively owned” will help to effectively solve the “one family, multiple houses’” problem, as well as difficulties in vacating old homesteads, and other issues.
 
The second is to distinguish between farmers’ different needs in terms of types of housing.  There is a strong demand for home construction among farmers in rural parts of the developed coastal areas. A cadre in S Village said that since taking office in December last year, his office has received more than 50 applications from villagers to build houses, while the cadre he replaced village cadres had left more than one hundred applications which had not been processed. These farmers' housing needs can be divided into three categories:
 
One category falls into the need for basic housing security, i.e. the previously mentioned households facing housing difficulties, whose needs in terms of housing are the most urgent, because they are faced with a situation in which houses can collapse at any time and they will have no place to live, so it is necessary to guarantee their housing rights and take the lead in addressing their needs.  A second category is the demand for improved housing, i.e. farmers whose housing situation is stable, but want to build new houses because their current homes are old, small, or out of style, etc. Their housing problem is not as urgent, and after the housing problem of the households with housing difficulties is solved, these should be processed according to local land conditions.  A third category is demand for investment housing, which includes both local villagers who have gotten rich by doing business or establishing factories outside the village, and who return to the village to invest in building houses in anticipation of the appreciation of land values, as well as cases of surplus urban capital arriving in the countryside to purchase farmers' homesteads for investment and construction purposes.
 
In the former case, their demand should be restrained in strict accordance with the system of “one family, one house” to prevent them from encroaching on new house building allocations in a shady manner; in terms of the latter, it is necessary to adhere to the law that rural homesteads cannot be bought and sold, otherwise a new round of capital enclosure will be formed based on the sale of rural homesteads, and the needs of rural housing-disadvantaged groups will be even harder to meet, while the interests of farmers at the bottom will be damaged. If demand is high and supply is low, failure to identify and properly deal with demand will lead to misallocation of public resources and even social injustice.
 
Third, we must continue to work to integrate village and community, reshape the public nature of the village and establish a community of social governance.  In a context of social transformation, village society tends toward disintegration, and regulations meant to maintain local public order do not succeed in playing their role in mediating internal conflicts among the people, which is a major challenge facing grassroots governance in the new era.  While village community and sense of commonality were grounded in kinship in traditional society, in the new era, such feelings will grow out of farmer’s organization. Only by organizing farmers to participate in the process of village construction, actively mobilizing them to solve common village problems, and stimulating their collective consciousness and sense of belonging to the village, can connections within village societies be reestablished.
 
In the process of homestead reform, we must insist on village and community coordination, and fully mobilize the main body of the peasants. Local authorities cannot give into the temptation to solve everything by administrative means, or push through problems just to be done with them. Concerned regions can take homestead reform as a starting point to explore the path of reshaping a sense of common belonging to the village, and establishing a social governance community.

Notes

[1]陈瑞燕, “农民为何建房难?” published online on the Observer platform/观察者网 on October 19, 2021.