Beaten, forced off their land, cheated out of money and even falsely imprisoned — farmers in China say they are paying a heavy price as authorities rush to deliver on ambitious pledges to ramp up national green energy output.
China has vowed that next year’s Winter Olympics are to be the first Games to be run entirely on wind and solar energy, and it has built scores of facilities to increase capacity — but critics say that ordinary people are being exploited by “land grabs” in the process.
In a hamlet near Beijing, the Long family — who say they have lost more than half their agricultural land to a sprawling solar farm next door — now have so little income they are burning corn husks and plastic bags to stay warm in winter.
Illustration: Mountain People
“We were promised just 1,000 yuan per mu of land each year when the power company leased the land for 25 years,” farmer Long from Huangjiao village said, using a Chinese unit of land equal to approximately 667m2.
“We can make more than double the amount by growing corn in the same area. Now without land, I eke out a living as a day laborer,” Long said.
China is the world’s biggest producer of wind turbines and solar panels, and the Winter Olympics is seen as an opportunity to showcase the country’s green technologies as they seek global markets.
To ensure an uninterrupted power supply for the Games — and clear the winter smog choking the Chinese capital — Hebei Province, which neighbors Beijing, has built a giant plant that takes in power from renewable projects in the province.
That one plant creates 14 billion kilowatt hours of clean electricity every year, similar to the annual energy consumption of Slovenia.
Yet for farmers like Long and his neighbor, Pi, the green energy boom has made their lives more dangerous and difficult.
Pi said that village residents were forced to sign contracts — seen by Agence France-Presse (AFP) — to lease their land to the solar park built by State Power Investment Group (SPIC), one of the five biggest utility companies in the country.
Those who did not agree were beaten by the police, he said, adding that “some were hospitalized, some were detained.”
Pi was jailed for 40 days, while Long languished in prison for nine months for “illegally gathering and disturbing the peace,” after a public protest.
“The situation is similar to a mafia,” Pi said. “If you complain, then you’ll be suppressed, imprisoned and sentenced.”
The average annual disposable rural income in Baoding is about 16,800 yuan (US$2,636), a figure Long and Pi said they can no longer make.
AFP could not confirm that electricity from the SPIC project near Huangjiao would be used to power the Olympic venues directly, because that information is not publicly available.
The company declined to confirm the matter, but the Zhangjiakou government — the city cohosting the Games — has said that since winning the Olympic bid in 2015, the area has “transformed itself from scratch [into] the largest non-hydro renewable energy base in China.”
Government subsidies for wind and solar farms have also accelerated construction of such projects in other parts of Hebei, as China scrambles to cut air pollution before the Games.
Amnesty International said in a statement that “forced evictions, illegal land seizures and loss of livelihoods related to the loss of land” were among the most frequent human rights concerns associated with the wind and solar energy sectors.
China wants 25 percent of its electricity to come from non-fossil fuels by 2030.
To achieve this, the country has to more than double its current wind and solar capacity, but environmentalists say that land seizures are likely to become more widespread as energy companies rush to produce renewables.
Although Beijing has set a series of ambitious targets around the Winter Olympics, green campaigners face heavy pressure in China if they challenge the official line.
Several said that they were not comfortable discussing Beijing’s environmental targets for the Games for fear of reprisals.
In September, China announced strict rules for compensation when land is taken over for ecological projects, including the development of green energy.
“Our land zoning [rules] also clearly regulate what agricultural land can’t be occupied, especially farmland,” said Li Dan, secretary-general of the renewable energy professionals committee that promotes green development. “This is a red line.”
If farmland is being used for renewable energy projects there should be a benefit sharing program in place, such as powering greenhouses, she said.
However, several farmers said companies were labeling agricultural fields as wasteland to skirt the rules.
Xu Wan, a farmer in Zhangjiakou, lost his land to a solar installation built in the run-up to the Games.
“The company told us this was non-usable land, but actually it’s all very good agricultural land used by us farmers,” Xu said. “They said they would give us 3,000 yuan per mu of land, but in the end, we got nothing.”
Zhangjiakou Yiyuan New Energy Development, which installed the solar project in Xu’s village, did not respond to a request for comment.
Jiang Yi (江億), a professor at Tsinghua University and a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, told a state-run industry news site that China would need 30,000km2 to 40,000km2 more land to meet its renewable energy needs.
“Where the land comes from has become the biggest issue restricting the development of the industry,” he said.
Renewable investments last year made up more than half the new projects under China’s global infrastructure push, the Belt and Road Initiative.
Some developers have also been accused of controversial practices when acquiring land overseas, said Priyanka Mogul, media officer at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, a UK-based non-profit that has studied the effect of Chinese renewable investments abroad.
“The most prevalent issue was inadequate disclosure of environmental impact assessment [data] ... followed by issues related to land rights and loss of livelihoods,” she said.
To reduce conflicts when taking over village land, China has billed most solar farms as poverty alleviation projects, where villagers receive free electricity from solar panels installed on their roofs.
State guidelines from 2014 say that utility companies should then buy back the extra electricity in a program aimed at lifting 2 million families out of poverty by last year.
More than double that number benefited last year, the Chinese National Energy Administration said.
However, in Huangjiao, with more than 300 households, only two roofs had solar panels, and villagers said there had been no program to install solar panels.
“At a central level, the government has good policies for farmers, but once it comes to the village level, things change,” Pi said. “The corruption at the grassroots level is intolerable.”
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