Forum: Land, Law and Protest

Over the last six decades, China has experienced repeated land reforms, each defining a different phase of the country’s economic development.

The Public Opinion Research Centre of Legal Daily (Fazhi ribao 法制日报) compiled a list of the laws and regulations that garnered the greatest public attention in 2012. The list included the Centre’s one-line assessments.

Many NIMBY protests in China oppose the building of new petrochemical and plastics factories, with plants intended to produce paraxylene, or PX, used in paints and plastics a particular target. The following is a list of the most notable NIMBY protests in China since 2007. Even studying media reporting and Internet chatter about such protests, it is hard to know whether the objectionable projects have been cancelled, halted temporarily, moved elsewhere or simply hidden behind high walls.

On 30 December 2012, Tencent News — a channel owned by the country’s largest Internet company — published a list of the ten most important protesters over the previous two years. Although the piece was soon censored from the channel, it went viral on social media. Here is a summary of the list, adapted with permission from a translation on GlobalVoices.org