LAST month, the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, adopted a landmark property law that grants equal protection to public and private property for sale in China - a revolutionary move for a country that still calls itself socialist and is run by a communist party.

After all, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, declared: "Communist theory may be summed up in one sentence: Abolition of private property." And now, China’s communist party has moved to elevate private property to the same level as public property.

No wonder, then, that the legislation was so controversial it took 14 years for it to be drafted and finally approved. The draft legislation underwent an unprecedented seven deliberations by the legislature.

Left-leaning intellectuals and scholars opposed the legislation on ideological grounds, while others opposed it for fear that ill-gotten gains would henceforth be protected. In the 25 years that China has been moving from a planned to a market economy, many state assets have been transformed into private ones through dubious means.

The new law is due to come into effect on Oct 1. But already Chief Justice Xiao Yang has announced that the Supreme People’s Court will be issuing legal interpretations so that courts around the country will properly understand the law.
The need for such a law arose from the country’s economic reforms. The private sector now accounts for 65 per cent of the country’s output.

The law is also meant to better protect farmers and their land because, in many localities, officials have made lucrative deals with developers, seizing agricultural land for the construction of luxury housing or shopping malls. The government acknowledges 90,000 cases of illegal land seizures last year.

Currently, all land belongs to the state.

Any attempt to privatise land will, no doubt, encounter even more vociferous opposition. And yet, this is a step that might well have to be taken if China is to truly have a market economy.

As recently as the 1990s, virtually all urban housing was state-owned. But today, most urban housing is privately owned, and this has created a need to protect private property from state interference.

In recent days, there has been a great deal of publicity about one particular house in Chongqing, in southwestern China, that was threatened by developers who are working with city officials. The owners, Yang Wu, a martial arts champion, and his wife, Wu Ping, refused to move even though hundreds of families around them had given up and accepted whatever terms the developers were willing to offer.

Their two-storey house, which used to be a restaurant, stood all alone on a needle of earth in the middle of a giant construction site. Water and electricity had long been cut off. The Chinese Press and the blogging community gave the matter a great deal of publicity. But the government clamped down.

Because of the timing, many thought this standoff would be a test case for the newly passed property law. However, a local court issued an order for the house to be torn down on March 22, and the law will not come into effect until October.

Yang showed his defiance of the court by returning to the house after the court order, using his martial arts skills by climbing up the steep mound using two pipes. He unfurled a Chinese flag atop his house, along with a banner that proclaimed: "A citizen’s legal property is not to be encroached upon." However, on March 30, the court issued a public notice ordering him to move out before April 10.