Village polls to channel public opinion: Wen

Wen made the comments while visiting Guangdong province in southern China, where an audacious protest by residents of Wukan village in late 2011 galvanized official attention on widespread anger over farmland confiscations.

The Chinese premier, who retires later this year, said he understood why villagers were often angry about land losses, and vowed to give real bite to protections that in theory give farmers a collective say in land development.

“What is the widespread problem now? It's the arbitrary seizure of farmers' fields, and the farmers have complaints about this, and it's even sparking mass incidents,” Wen said in Guangdong on Saturday, according to the Xinhua report.

“Mass incidents” is the official euphemism for protests, riots and mass petitions.

“The root of the problem is that the land is the property of the farmers, but this right has not been protected in the way it should be,” said Wen.

Wen, who has cast himself as a defender of the struggling farmer, also vowed to make village committee elections — seen by many residents as an empty formality under the thumb of officials — into an authentic channel for public opinion.

Neither Wen's comments on land nor on village elections broke new policy ground, but they underscored government jitters about rural discontent as China's ruling Communist Party heads towards a leadership handover in late 2012. He did not mention the Wukan protests.

Farmers in China do not directly own their fields. Instead, most rural land is owned collectively by a village, with farmers allocated leases for usage rights that last for decades.

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