Abstract

On March 16, 2007, the Property Law ( Wuquan fa) was finally passed by the People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (PRC) after numerous readings and revisions on large and small scales over the past fourteen years. For the first time in the judicial history of China, a law was passed formally and explicitly legitimizing the ownership of private property. In the past, only public property was legally protected and such public ownership served as a foundational concept of China's socialist polity, but the Property Law claims to offer legal protections to public and private properties…