 Forced evictions with little or no compensation occur frequently in both urban and rural China , with even fewer legal protections for rural citizens . Collectively owned rural land may be " reallocated " at the discretion of authorities , and in many regions local governments collude with private developers to reclassify rural land as urban land , which can then be sold. from the mid @-@ 1990s to mid @-@ 2000s , an estimated 40 million Chinese peasants were affected by land requisitions . Citizens who resist or protest the evictions have reportedly been subjected to harassment , beatings , or detention , and land @-@ related grievances occasionally escalate into large @-@ scale protests or riots . 
