 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.
