Draft PRC Property Law Available for Comment
July 10th, 2005The National People’s Congress Standing Committee has made available for public comment the draft of the PRC property law. The draft is of course in Chinese. A Xinhua story about the public comment opportunity is here. The NPCSC’s announcement is here. The public comment period will run until August 20.
Soliciting public comment on draft laws is not required in China, just as indirect public consent to new laws through elections is not. Nonetheless, drafts of some administrative regulations are now routinely offered for public review prior to enactment. However, this is less common with major laws. I suppose this indicates special sensitivity about this law and a desire to practice PRC style democracy by collecting comments from “concerned parties.” It could also indicate some disagreement about the law in the NPCSC and a desire to defer enactment.
The PRC constitution was amended last March to affirm that the state protects private property.
I regard the strengthening of property rights in China as a good thing (and of course also applaud the public disclosure of draft laws). Still, one must note the irony. When Mao Zedong and a handful of others held the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921, they adopted resolutions calling for “elimination of the capitalist private ownership system,” and the Party later unleashed great violence in pursuit of this misguided notion. See 中国共产党历次党章的制定及修正简况 [Zhongguo gongchandang lici dangzhang de zhiding ji xiuzheng jiankuang, Summary of Previous Formulations and Revisions to the Chinese Communist Party Constitution], available here.
July 10th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
This law has been many years in the making. Good to see it finally came out. In your judgement, are there any major differences between this law and “western” property laws?
It’s also interesting to see that in Chinese this law is not called “Chan Quan Fa”, as “property law” is, but “Wu Quan Fa”. Is there any significance with this distinction? Or is it simply because China already had laws on intellectual property? Thanks.
July 11th, 2005 at 12:15 am
I’ll have to read it through before answering about differences, but I suspect this will be substantially convergent with non-PRC legal notions.
I, too, am curious about the choice of terms. “Wu” seems to strongly connote physical materiality, but the term wouldn’t be neccessitated by IP laws—they could have used “chan” and made a distinction in the definitions between real estate (bu dong cai chan) and IP (zhi shi cai chan).