Beijing pushes to consolidate small family plots into large-scale agribusinesses.

a horizon of cranes building walkup apartments. These the company offered to farmers in exchange for their homes, so it could tear them down and plant rice there. Rumors circulated that Eastern Fortune even planned to rename the 300-year-old village — after itself.

But Wasteland is already a company town. Eastern Fortune offers farmers an annual payment to sublease their land and sell the harvest. The rate is 50% higher than the average Chinese farmer’s annual earnings of about $1,580. But with prices for everything in China rising, contracting one’s land for the stipulated three-year period means betting against the market. It also means losing a house’s garden and chicken coops that provide secondary income, as well as food for the family table.

“The government expects companies to lead the ‘backward’ peasants to change,” Auntie Yi fumed. Perhaps the old party official in her missed shouldering that responsibility? But whereas many in Wasteland eagerly leased their land and moved into the apartments, the holdouts — mostly older, lifelong farmers — want stronger legal protections so they won’t be coerced into signing the agreement. They want the freedom to sell, mortgage or invest in larger farms and better acreage — not unlike the way urban Chinese can play the real estate market.

Yet in Beijing, any talk of privatization for individual farmers has been muted or denounced as unconstitutional because by law the state owns all land (but not individual houses). Top officials are unabashed in their support for privately managed farms, however. A billboard in Wasteland showed then-President Hu Jintao smiling not with a group of farmers in the field, but with a group of managers at the headquarters of Eastern Fortune Rice.

For Chinese New Year this year the company gave farmers an oversized calendar with photos of its threshers and mechanized rice polishers. The calendar also holds traditional couplets, such as the New Year’s saying: Reflect on the past months/and sign contracts at once.

To Auntie Yi, that sounded pushy, even in verse. She refused to move into the new apartments and wept the day the digger arrived to tear out her poppies. A week later, the night after workers lay the sod, Auntie Yi lodged her protest. Under cover of darkness, she eased down on her elderly knees and planted twice the poppy seeds as before. Come springtime, her patch of Red Flag Road will bloom a riot of color once more.