To sceptics, it may end up being China’s very own Great October Counter-Revolution. Or the Great Leap Backward. For the ruling communists, it is the next big thing in China after the reform initiated by Deng Xiaoping 30 years ago. Both sides generally agree, however, that the rural reform the central committee of the Communist Party of China unveiled last month is going to transform China’s villages and farmers — one way or the other.

The Chinese story has plenty of lessons for both Singur-scarred Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and farmer-embracing Mamata Banerjee. Let us first have the official version of China’s new rural reform. It allows the farmers to “lease their contracted farmland or transfer their land use right”. The idea is to boost the scale of operation for farm production by absorbing capital in the countryside and also to provide funds for farmers to start new businesses.

According to the text of the CPC document published in the party organ, People’s Daily, markets for the lease of contracted farmland and transfer of farmland usage rights will be set up and improved to allow farmers to “sub-contract, lease, exchange and swap” their land use rights or join share-holding entities with their farmland. Such transfers of land use rights “must be voluntarily participated in by farmers, with adequate payment and in accordance with the law”, the CPC document says.

“The breakthrough is necessary”, Xu Xianglin, an economics professor at the Party School of the CPC central committee, was quoted by People’s Daily as saying, “It meets the needs of industrialization and urbanization at the current stage.”

This is the fourth big land reform since the founding of communist China in 1949. The first came right after the revolution when landlords’ land was seized and redistributed among landless peasants. The second came in 1955 when all land was vested in the people’s communes so that China could make the Great Leap Forward — in agriculture as well as in industry. The resulting disaster — sharp falls in production, famines and deaths of millions — is history.

The third reform was ushered in by Deng at the third plenum of the CPC central committee in 1978. The people’s communes were dissolved and farmers got back individual plots, mostly belonging to their ancestors, under a “household responsibility contract system”. Land continued to belong to the State, but farmers now had their own plots “contracted” from the State and could sell part of their produce in the open market.

The fourth reform at the third plenum of the 17th central committee, put in motion last month, has disappointed those who had anticipated it to make the revolutionary — or, counter-revolutionary — push for private ownership of land. Land is still State property, but this latest reform has done two big things — it has extended the contract tenure from the existing 30 years to 70 years and it has greatly expanded the farmers’ rights to the use of their land.

Whichever way one looks at it, it is a historic move. Even after three decades of relentless economic growth and urbanization, China currently has 950 million registered farmers, with 750 million of them actually living in the countryside. The official policy is to ensure that 50 per cent of the country’s 1.3 billion-strong population live in urban areas by 2020. So, with that ambitious plan of a great population shift to urban areas and now this new land reform, what happens to China’s agriculture and to its farmers?

The answers are like these. Like Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and his party, Chinese comrades clearly think that farming is not enough to improve the living standards of the farmers. They need farm-based industry on their land, in addition to other industries.

Second, the present form of agriculture — by traditional methods on small plots — is no good for either agricultural production or for raising the farmers’ incomes. In other words, farming in China needs to be modernized on a big scale — mainly through large-scale injection of capital that farmers are incapable of providing. In other words, agriculture needs to be capitalized. It is important to remember that arable land constitutes only 22 per cent of China’s total land area, the rest covering mountains, grassland, deserts and rivers.

That the present system is not working has been evident for several years now. But what propelled the new rural reform more than other things is the Chinese rulers’ growing anxiety that the gap between city and village or between rich and poor is getting too big to manage. Protests by peasants — against raw deals by government officials and forcible seizure of their land by government or businesses — are growing phenomenally. In 2006, even the ministry of labour and social security warned that the system (in other words, communist rule) would become very unstable if the rural-urban divide is not bridged through some radical measures.

So that has been the theme song of the government — and the CPC — propaganda on the new reform since it was unveiled last month. Its aim, the official line says, is to bridge that gap and double farmers’ income by 2020.

The sceptics dismiss that line. They see in the new reform a great conspiracy (note the parallel in Bengal) to practically rob the farmers of their land and give it over to big businesses. And, in support of their argument, they cite statements like the ones made by party officials and party-affiliated academics like Dang Guoying of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “The move will speed up the country’s urbanization”, said Dang, “by bringing more farmers to the cities with the big farm contractors promoting modern farming in rural areas”. It would be contract farming, which the Communist Party of India (Marxist) wanted to usher in in Bengal and which was thwarted by the Marxists’ partners, the Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party in particular.

How then to protect the farmers against the big farm contractors? The official Chinese answer is that the government will set up “markets” for the transfer or lease of farmland by farmers and this will be done with consent from — and proper compensation to — the farmers.

Therein precisely lies the rub, cry the critics. The farmers will be completely defenceless, they say, against corrupt officials and party leaders who are always in league with land-grabbing businessmen. There is so much truth in this apprehension that even party faithfuls cannot deny it. It has become a cliché to say that corruption is endemic in China. But never was a cliché so true and so important to reiterate.

No matter what the party’s top leadership — or the government — does, there seems to be no cure for the cancer of China’s corruption. So much so that Hu Jintao, China’s president and general secretary of the CPC, has publicly said that a successful fight against corruption means life and death to communist rule and even to the stability of the nation. Earlier this year, the CPC began a five-year campaign to fight corruption.

The results are showing. Not a day now passes without scores of party and government officials, some of them at the top level, being dismissed from their jobs or sentenced on corruption charges. How deep and all-pervading corruption is came to be underscored once again by two recent events. A former vice-mayor of the Beijing municipal corporation was sentenced to death last month — with two years’ reprieve. And, last week, the vice-president of the Supreme People’s Court was dismissed from service — the highest-ranking official to be punished for corruption since 1949.

The problem is that the anti-corruption drive neither assures the people enough nor deters others from repeating the crimes. The death sentence of the former Beijing vice-mayor came only a few years after one of his predecessors got a long jail sentence. It also followed closely the 16-year sentence that a former CPC political bureau member and party secretary of the powerful Shanghai committee got in April this year.

One has to just recall the series of scandals over the past few months involving contamination of baby milk- powder and several other food items. All these are linked to the axis of evil, of which party, government and business are parts. And, it just goes on — at all levels.

Last year, there were sensational exposures involving some of the country’s highest officials — former president of the Bank of China, who was also an alternate member of the CPC central committee, vice-governor of the People’s Bank of China and a former director of State Administration of Foreign Exchange. The last mentioned leapt to his death from the seventh floor of a Beijing hospital while under investigation.

As the food contamination scandals broke in recent months, the people recalled that a former head of the State Food and Drug Administration was executed in July last year for taking large amounts in bribes from eight pharmaceutical companies to approve fake and sub-standard drugs. But when this year’s scandals broke, they also knew how little has really changed.

What hope for farmers in such a regime, no matter how good the rural reform looks on paper? — the critics ask. The party’s argument, however, is that things have to change because the problems have reached desperate levels. And they have to change at the village level, where the problems are the most acute and the resentment the strongest.