Property Rights in Communist China

A new property law is causing upset stomachs in the Peoples' Paradise. Nice reporting from The Economist. An excerpt: Yet in the long term the leftist opponents of China's property law are surely right to be worried about what has been begun this month. They understand the law will entrench the rights of the carpet-baggers who have looted the state as it has privatised assets. They also understand that the law, for all its technicalities, does not chime with an avowedly communist government. The leftists derive their theory not from Confucius, but from Marx. Were the latter writing today, he would surely see in China a revolution waiting to happen—or perhaps two. One is the bourgeois revolution led by the emerging property-owning middle class that the new law will help. The other is the potential for the simmering resentment in the countryside to boil over, perhaps in frustration at the law's shortcomings. Property rights are at the root of both—which is why the dozing NPC delegates may have started a process this month that will one day change their country completely. FULL STORY...