LAST week the State Council issued an emergency notice aimed at making it more difficult for developers to take over land by force.

The notice prohibits forced demolition and relocation in the absence of proper legal process, proper compensation, proper accommodations for the evicted, and emergency options in case of ugly clashes.

Local officials would be held accountable for "vicious incidents."

Powerful developers are racing against time, in cahoots with many local governments, to grab what they can before seizure becomes more difficult.

On the same day that notice was broadcast, CCTV reported a forced relocation in Guangping County, Hebei Province.

A recipient of state poverty-relief funds, the county's annual fiscal income was only 130 million yuan (US$19 million).

But it is pledging over 2 billion yuan (US$294 million) on infrastructure to remake itself in a matter of three years, and in its eagerness had razed 1,000 homes in 10 days without adequately compensating the routed.

At a time when it becomes exceedingly slow to extract GDP from the real economy, pulling down homes and then turning over the land to property developers is the surest way for local officials to show performance - unfortunately measured largely in terms of GDP growth.

A far grander move is occurring in Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, and is being contemplated by Chongqing, which has earmarked a staggering 180 billion yuan for face-lift.

Both areas have just experienced historical drought of devastating proportions.

On February 23, in Kunming, two village cadres were stabbed to death in a dispute with fellow villagers. One villager also died.

The government intended to take over the village land near the Dianchi Lake for property development, but the villagers demanded a fair deal, and refused to sign any agreement.

When the government rammed a settlement through the village cadres, the villagers reacted by killing the cadres, whom they believed had betrayed the village interests.

A powerful local official has made known his displeasure at the "shabby" look of Kunming and vowed to aggressively improve its appearance.

When I visited Dianchi Lake about four years ago, the heavily polluted body of water was being girded by a superhighway.

I read recently that the area immediately surrounding the fast-shrinking lake is now hot property for competing real estate developers.

In the name of development, the government is taking proactive measures to destroy "villages within the city."

This refers to villages overtaken and surrounded by an expanding city, backward eyesores for image-conscious officials.

In America, there is an ongoing discussion on how urban agriculture can enhance the health, create green jobs, and reconnect people to their food and land.

Raped fields

In Chinese hierarchy, officials are evaluated and promoted chiefly on account of their contribution to GDP, which can be extracted through dynamic changes in the urban landscape, or infrastructure investment.

A common strategy today is to fuel a building boom, stoke home sales, and leverage skyward the home prices.

Chinese has an agriculture-based civilization.

In a memorial to the emperor in 168 BC, Chao Cuo explained why the sovereign should value food, rather than pearls, silver, or gold.

"Rice and cloth come from the soil and need to be cultivated seasonally and intensively, over prolonged periods," he wrote of the cement between the land and the people. That's the basis of social stability.

When there is no need for agriculture, farmers would be uprooted, and leave their homes.

Today, however, officials are devising ingenious means to separate the peasants from their land.

According to a recent issue of Banyuetan (Bimonthly Forum), a Xinhua-sponsored journal, a township in Lixin County in Anhui Province had been trying to take over 2,700 mu (180 hectares) of farmland to build a Township New Area. Their ambition was resisted by the peasants.

Those assigned the task of takeover made a sneak attack during the night, by ploughing up the wheat fields.

A similar incident occurred late last year in Peizhou, Jiangsu Province, where over 10,000 mu of wheat fields were deliberately inundated to overcome strong resistance from local farmers. The reclaimed land was slated for a park.

Last July Peizhou was listed among the nation's Top 100 Counties, crowned by an administrative center that looks alike a smaller Zhongnanhai, where China's leadership works.

As long as GDP growth is seen as a reflection of positive performance, we will hear more of such cases.

Rural China had been sidelined well before it was trampled in the land rushes.

For a considerable period of time, the peasants' attachment to their land has been perceived as backward, and working the land has become a kind of residual existence left for the aged and the unenterprising.

They are being constantly reminded of their wants, in comparison with urban amenities and luxuries.

Urban life has been seen as the fount from whence all blessings flow.

Several years ago the central government launched an ambitious "New Countryside Construction" campaign, but we hear little of it these days.

Policy change

The government needs to be unequivocal and unwavering in tackling the rural issue.

First and foremost, it should reconsider its aggressive urbanization drive.

Second, it must help the millions of displaced peasants take root somewhere.

The leadership must be cognizant of the fact that glowing GDP figures do not fully reflect the price at which our growth has been achieved.

The spate of suicide jumps at Foxconn and the strike at Honda plants hint at the measure of frustration and discontent among some migrant workers.

The government also needs to measure the health of our community in non-GDP terms.

That reminds me of an observation by Thomas Carlyle.

"In the Body ... the first condition of complete health is, that each organ perform its function unconsciously, unheeded; let but any organ announce its separate existence, were it even boastfully, and for pleasure, not for pain ... then already is derangement there."

Similarly, we need to scrutinize how different parts of our society harmonize, not our capacity to dress up, gobble up, or excrete.