I guess I should say something about the National People’s Congress – the PRC legislature – which is currently in progress in Beijing. 

     Premier Wen Jiabao promised "prosperity for all."  How can anyone be against that?

Premier Wen Jiabao
yesterday pledged to spread prosperity to all while placing the plight
of the rural poor and people’s well-being on top of the government’s
agenda.

To wide applause from the nearly 3,000 deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC),
Wen outlined concrete steps to deal with problems related to the vital
interests of the people, ranging from education, housing and medical
treatment to employment.

   Sounds great but the plan is to deliver prosperity by creating a "new socialist countryside;" that is, keep using the same authoritarian-collectivist means (i.e. land ownership not by individual farmers but by village-level collective units) which have spawned so much trouble in recent years.  Farmers see through this as this comment from Cheng Yangzhen, a legislator from a rural district, suggests:

Cheng said farmers prefer to lease their land for a set term, such as 10 or
20 years, or they may become shareholders by investing in the facilities built
on their land.

"The vital problem," Cheng said, "is to identify the rights of the farmers."

    Notice his language.  He has to couch things in terms of long-term leases which, if they could be upheld in the corrupt legal system, might provide rights to the land for a longer period of time.  But listen to his last comment: "the vital problem is to identify the rights of the farmers."

    There had been a law on property rights that was supposed to come up in this session but it was scuttled after a "leftist" critic complained that it did not live up to the "socialist constitution."   Thus, all that is left for Cheng and other farmers is to work for improvements in the second-best leasing system.  Not only do they not have the legal tool of individual land rights to defend their claims in court, they are also thwarted from organizing in groups to protect themselves from corrupt local officials, who use their political positions to control the collectively-owned land to feather their own nests:

Yet the central government has so far failed to address the main
political cause of the rising number of protests: farmers lack the
right to act as a legitimate interest group. It’s true that villagers
have a constitutional right to lodge complaints against officials who
violate the law or neglect their duties. They can also sue local
governments for unlawful administrative acts, file petitions, and even
reject illegal, local fees. But these rights are limited in that
villagers are only allowed to challenge local governments individually,
not in groups.

 Without individual title to their land and without effective rights to organize collectively, farmers have nowhere to turn except protests and demonstrations, some of which turn violent.  And until the Party seriously changes these underlying legal and political realities it is hard to see how it will avoid continuing rural unrest.

The people are impossible to rule, and it’s only because you leaders are masters of extenuation that they’re impossible to rule.

    – Tao Te Ching, 75