Page 2 of 2 China: More rights for
millionaires By
Pallavi Aiyar
such protests has seen a
more than 400% increase over the past decade.
Given this situation, both the policies
and rhetoric of the Hu-Wen duo have taken a swing
leftward. The leadership has thus made tackling
the income inequalities between China's rich urban
and poor rural areas the centerpiece of their new
five-year plan, borrowing language from the past
in promising to build a "new
socialist countryside". Both
at the NPC and in speeches elsewhere, Wen has
repeatedly stressed that "social justice" is as
important a goal for China as economic growth.
The government has raised spending for
rural health care and education sharply for two
successive years. At this year's NPC session, Wen
said in his opening address that tuition and other
fees for all rural students would be eliminated,
helping some 150 million families. He added that
the government would step up spending on rural
primary and middle schools by 21%, to the
equivalent of US$29 billion.
The premier
also promised greater central-government support
for health care in rural areas, where 90% of the
population has no health insurance. He said a
trial cooperative medical-care system would be
extended to cover 80% of China's territory, with
the government more than doubling subsidies to
$1.31 billion.
Crucially, however, Wen
made no reference at all in his address to the
most controversial item on the NPC's agenda: the
property law.
The property bill was
introduced to the NPC two days after the opening
session of the parliament. In his explanation of
the CCP's support of the bill, an NPC vice
chairman, Wang Zhaoguo, told gathered
parliamentarians that given China's current
economic circumstances, the people "urgently
require effective protection of their own lawful
property accumulated through hard work".
The final shape that the draft law took
was patently the result of an attempt to stitch up
a compromise between the bill's detractors and
supporters and aimed at striking a balance between
state and private interests. The bill clearly laid
out definitions of both and also defined private
wealth, including income, houses, investments and
other personal assets.
However, it stopped
far short of moving toward privatizing
collectively owned rural land. Instead, it
maintained the concept that property is owned
publicly, and individuals are merely given a right
to use that property. It's that right of use that
the law protects, not private ownership of land.
In a further accommodation to new-left
criticisms, the bill affirmed the state-owned
sector as the "leading force". "The nation is in
the first stage of socialism and should stick to
the basic economic system in which public
ownership predominates, co-existing with other
kinds of ownership," it read.
But this
watered-down version may have fallen short of
satisfying either side of the debate.
"Private property is the foundation of
civilization. It must be protected," said Dean
Peng, a Beijing-based free-market advocate and
commentator. "Public ownership results in poverty,
as China has already experienced."
Peng
was skeptical, however, that the new law will
substantially help push forward the
economic-reform process. The actual impact of the
law is likely to be minimal, he said, because it
merely restates what was already the status quo.
In rural areas, farmers have the right to lease
collectively owned land for 30-odd years but
cannot buy or sell it. In urban areas, residents
have been able to buy and sell 50-to-70-year
leases on property for well over a decade.
Peng pointed out that several laws
governing the leasing of land in both rural and
urban areas were already in place. The new law
does not alter these but rather brings them
together under a single overarching law. This
might be argued to give them additional weight,
but Peng was nonetheless dismissive. "We already
have enough laws on paper to protect property
rights. What we need is rule of law, so that these
laws can really be implemented," he said.
Beyond the statement of general principles
and reiteration of already existent regulations,
there are some new clarifications in the law, but
these primarily spell out the legal position on
certain points of dispute between the
property-owning middle classes and real-estate
developers. For example, the law has a clause that
stipulates that parking spaces around highrises
belong to apartment owners and not to the property
developers, previously a gray area that led to
numerous disputes.
Wang Zhaoguo's
explanation of the bill before the NPC, however,
made scant reference to the middle classes and
their interests, focusing instead on those parts
of the draft law that addressed concerns regarding
asset stripping of state-owned factories, illegal
transfers of farmland to real-estate developers by
local governments, and adequate compensation for
those whose lands are expropriated legally.
The law contains provisions aimed at
ameliorating all of these concerns. For example,
it states that if any person "causes loss of
state-owned property by transferring it at a low
price, illegally sharing it in conspiracy with
another person, placing a charge over it without
authorization, or by other means in the course of
restructuring the enterprise", he or she will bear
legal liability.
It also explicitly gives
farmers the right to renew their land-use leases
after they expire.
However, Professor Wen
Tiejun, dean of the School of Agriculture and
Rural Development at Renmin University and a
leading new-left scholar, remained unconvinced by
these claims. "The law is dressed up to show that
it will protect rural people and public-owned
property, but in fact its main aim is to give more
rights to China's new millionaires and urban
middle class," he said.
Putting private
property on an equal legal footing with that of
state-owned and collective property, Wen Tiejun
argued, was a dangerous first step toward the
eventual privatization of all property in China,
an outcome he said would be a disaster for the 700
million Chinese who continue to live in rural
areas.
Rural residents have no
state-provided social security, Wen explained, so
that their communally owned plot of land is often
virtually all that remains between them and
destitution. Were they allowed to sell this land,
it would expose them to exploitation and
impoverishment on an altogether more alarming
scale than at present, he concluded.
His
solution for preventing illegal sale of farmland
is to slow down the rate of urbanization. The only
point where he agreed with free-market advocate
Dean Peng was that laws in China had only a
limited impact given the shortcomings of the legal
system. "Merely formulating new laws will not
change the situation on the ground," he said.
What is evident is that while the property
bill may have been passed into law, the tensions
within Chinese society it exposed continue to
simmer.
China's current leadership has
come in for criticism for what some analysts see
as its weakness and ensuing inability to take a
firm stand. Unlike Jiang, it is indeed hard to
classify Hu and Wen as either decidedly pro-left
or pro-reform. Their strategy has instead been to
develop a more left-oriented rhetoric while
simultaneously but quietly pushing along the
reform agenda.
On the other hand, their
penchant for compromise could also be interpreted
as a maturing of the political system in China in
which the leadership must take into account and
attempt to reconcile opposing interests and views.
Moving ahead through consensus rather than
heavy-handed, untrammeled diktats from the top is
more the style of a democracy. China's one-party
system remains far from democratic in the Western
liberal sense, but it is showing some signs of
greater internal debate.
The course of
China's development is thus likely to remain the
subject of contention, but in the short term at
least the country looks set to continue its
embrace of pragmatism over ideology. The voices
from the left might be getting louder, but so far
there are scant indications that China will take a
major swerve off the path of economic reform.
Pallavi Aiyar is the China
correspondent for The Hindu.
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