China's great leap forward on property
After 14 years of debate, China is due to pass a property-rights law next Friday.
from the March 15, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"People's living standards have improved in general, and they urgently require effective protection of their own lawful property accumulated through hard work," argued Mr. Wang as he presented the Property Law to the NPC. Such protection, he added, is "the general aspiration and urgent demand of the people."
By casting the law in this light Wang was seeking to counter criticism from opponents that it benefits only China's super-rich by legalizing the dubious deals through which many of them got their start in business – buying state property at rock-bottom prices.
Pressured by that sort of argument, the legislation's drafters introduced several amendments "of tremendous practical significance," Wang insisted, to "strengthen protection of socialist public property" and defend it from questionable privatization.
But the law is clearly not limited to the houses and cars that Chinese city-dwellers regard as necessities, in the same light as their parents once viewed wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines. Protection of private property extends to the "means of production" – a recognition of reality in a country where private enterprise now accounts for nearly two-thirds of GDP.
It does not, however, extend to agricultural land, which remains collectively owned by peasant villages and not immune to seizures by developers, which have provoked thousands of sometimes violent protests in recent years.
Denying farmers the right to own their land, argues one European diplomat, "is a great missed opportunity and a demonstration of [President] Hu Jintao's lack of courage."
The law leaves the current system, whereby farmers rent their land for 30-year periods, untouched. Peasants can sublet their assigned land to neighbors, but may not sell it nor borrow against it on a mortgage so as to invest in machinery or other equipment. Reforming that system was clearly too radical a prospect for a cautious government that had enough trouble with the law as it was.
In putting their free-market reformist right foot forward, the authorities had to dress their move up in a good deal of leftist language about "improving the Chinese-style socialist property system" and how "the State-owned economic sector is the leading force" so as to placate opponents of the Property Law.
RSS feed
