In the past decade, China has been shaken by several waves of demonstrations, but the land protests have the potential to be the most transformative—in part because of the demographics of the revolutionaries. This is not just an uprising of peasants or downtrodden workers. Many of the foot soldiers are urban professionals—lawyers, business owners, and managers who have gained confidence and wealth during China’s economic boom. They have resources, access to the internet, and knowledge of how the government works.

In the picturesque city of Hangzhou, residents hold clandestine meetings to talk about property rights and launch petitions to the local government, publicizing their cases and trying to get media attention. They work with lawyers who specialize in land issues and sue developers. They write anti-eviction slogans on their clothing and parade through town. Among the people advising them is Li, a corporate manager (he asks me not to use his full name), who says local authorities forced him to surrender his house and, in return, gave him housing in a far less desirable neighborhood. Li gave up on his own case after his complaints to officials went unanswered, but he says, “I’m concerned about similar cases,” adding that “citizens have high education in Hangzhou. Most of the people know about land-rights issues in other places. They know from the internet.”

Some activists think the land protests will climax at this summer’s Olympics in Beijing. There, the city government had made plans to tear down some 60,000 houses a year, evicting 1.5 million people, in part to build Olympic sports facilities, luxury shopping complexes, entertainment districts, and residential areas, according to a report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, a research group in Geneva. These evictions have led to protests not only over the destruction of homes but also plans to build a new waste treatment facility and the refurbishment of a state television station that will cover the Games.

Very few of the evictions in China would qualify as legal in other countries, and even in China the legality is murky. Because the state technically owns all urban land and the average Chinese citizen simply owns the right to live on the land for a time, government officials have massive leverage on homeowners and can force them to leave their property without paying much—if anything—in compensation.

In some cases, private developers who are in cahoots with local officials have forced citizens from their homes. In 2007, China’s Ministry of Land and Resources admitted that local officials were involved in roughly 80 percent of all illegal landgrabs. The government acknowledged that there were 131,000 cases of illegal land seizure in 2006, nearly 20 percent more than in 2005.

On blogs and websites, Chinese protesters chronicle the details of their cases and relate tales of their evictions. Chinese journalists scour these sites, sometimes sneaking stories of real estate battles past the eyes of government censors and into the mainstream media. As the middle-class revolutionaries fight for property rights, their struggle may spill over into other, more controversial areas. “They are asking for more rights for their property, and they’ll wind up asking for democratic management, democratic votes, due process,” predicts Qiu Feng, a researcher at the Cathay Institute of Public Affairs in Beijing.

In Chongqing, a city of about 30 million, real estate protesters hung banners proclaiming "Govern for the People, Take Human Rights into Account," and "The People’s Interest Is No Minor Issue," according to a report by the International Federation for Human Rights, a coalition of groups based in France. Some of these slogans echo those heard during the protests of the late 1980s, when popular anger over corruption and the lack of political reform sparked a national uprising that culminated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989.