China's landowners get legal status

[wld_team]

2 Oct 2007,

BEIJING: China gave legal status to millions of landowners as the new property law came into effect on Monday, the country’s national day. It is the first time since 1949 that landowners can truly call their property their own instead of being leaseholders.

The new law enables China to break broke away from one of the crucial tenets of Communist ideology: the monopoly of the state over all property. The landmark property law ensures a level of protection to private property equal to that attached to public property.

The making of this law saw the rare event of legislators at the National People’s Congress (NPC), often criticised as a rubber stamp of the government, actually putting through dissenting notes. The property bill sent through repeated revisions as a large number of legislators opposed several provisions in it and it took the NPC an unprecedented eight readings to pass it.

Most property owners have had to contend with long-term leases from the government all these years. They will not be allowed to actually own their property, and have no worries about forcible takeover by the government.

It’s being understood as a serious move by the government to give up some of its Marxist-Leninist socialist pretence, and is also an admission that China is firmly on the capitalist path. This is significant when seen in the light of some of the comments of Mao Zedong, who said: “Marxism-Leninism is the trunk of the tree; I am just a twig.”

Soon we will be more capitalist than the USA, maybe not so soon.

Yeah, I need help

really?