Walter Hutchens’ Blog

In the next day or so, the National People’s Congress will vote to amend the PRC Constitution, implementing changes determined earlier by Party leaders. Among the changes to be enacted is an addition of words concerning the status of private property.

Adding slogans to the PRC Constitution about the protection of private property is a significant act of political symbolism, particularly given that an original aim of the Chinese Communist Party was the abolition of private property.

However, in practice what it means to have private property in China continues to be an evolving matter. For example, millions of PRC citizens now have property rights through the ownership of shares in listed companies.

But the protection of these rights is sometimes anemic at best. Last year the Supreme People’s Court issued these rules allowing shareholders to sue listed companies for disclosure fraud. But to date no court in China has handed down a judgement in one of these cases, and the court’s rules themselves contain many obstacles to such lawsuits.

So in that context and others the protection of private property has a long way to go before it becomes more than an aspirational slogan, even as one acknowledges that China has made enormous progress since the Party moved away from its disastrous goal of eliminating private property.