Bauernaufstand in China: Pekings Praktik, vor allem Landbewohner einfach bei neuen Großprojekten zu enteignen, stösst verstärkt auf heftige Proteste der Bevölkerung: The 8,000 people of Shishan have waged one of the longest fights in China over such confiscations. But their struggle has found echoes all over Fuzhou, the surrounding Fujian province and the country. As China's headlong development pits farmers against developers allied with local officials, the peasants and other rural landowners who still make up 60 percent of China's 1.3 billion people increasingly have tried to resist. The Construction Ministry said it received three times as many complaints in the first quarter of this year as in the same period last year. By the end of June, Deputy Minister Fu Wenjia told the Beijing News that 4,000 groups and more than 18,600 individuals had lodged petitions over allegedly illicit land transfers. Farmers have also taken their complaints to the street. Hundreds lined up bicycles and rickshaws to block traffic in a Beijing suburb on Aug. 20, protesting the seizure of land by a state-owned development company building high-end villas for foreigners and wealthy Chinese seeking to escape the capital's downtown pollution."