Beginning in the 1990s, both scholars and central officials repeatedly suggested that taxes and fees imposed on peasants by local governments were the biggest source of discontent and protest in China. Although higher levels of the Chinese government frequently urged lower levels to “reduce peasant burdens,” little changed in the countryside until the central government rolled out tax-for-fee reforms (TFR), first in Anhui province in 2000 and then throughout most of the rest of the country in 2002. TFR was a program designed by the central government to reduce and rationalize local governments’ extraction from peasants by replacing a wide range of taxes and fees that officials abused with one low agricultural tax. Going even further, the central government mandated that local governments phase out even this agricultural tax completely by 2006. Over a period of a few years this freed China’s peasants from a tax they had paid for over two millennia. Yet, despite this decrease in what was likely the largest source of unrest, the number of protests (euphemistically termed “mass incidents”) increased dramatically (Graph 1) during this period and probably since, although no official data has been released since the mid-2000s. While a wide variety of factors are surely at play, the simplest explanation is that officials in rural areas continued to rely on rural residents as their primary source of revenue. Specifically, rural governments shifted from taxing rural residents to taking their land. We demonstrate this by showing that in this period the number of administrative lawsuits related to taxation decreased while the number of land cases increased dramatically.