Property rights in China: equal for all?

Cui.jpg

Cui Yingjie in court

Further to the recent Danwei post about China’s new property law challenging the power of chengguan — inspectors who patrol the city — to confiscate the personal property of street vendors, last week’s sentencing of Cui Yingjie highlights an interesting disconnect in the Chinese public discourse about property rights. Cui is a sausage seller who last year confronted the unfortunate situation of having his sales cart confiscated — for the second time — by chengguan. Cui had spent all his money (RMB 380) on the second cart. Dramatic news footage caught Cui on his knees, begging the chengguan to allow him to keep it. After the official refused, Cui slit his throat. In the media coverage surrounding his sentencing, no mention was made of Cui’s property rights in the cart or of any possible right to defend his property with force.

In fact, whether Cui had any property right in his cart is questionable. The property law wasn’t passed until March 16, 2007, and it won’t take effect until October 1. And, as a China Youth Daily op-ed warns, even if the property law had been in force, “between legal principles and reality there exists some distance.”

But contrast the silence on the property issue in Cui’s situation with the media storm surrounding the “Nail House of Chongqing” case. Much of the media focus and Internet chatter about the nail house related to property rights and the new property law. The Chongqing nail house was hailed as a possible “test case” for the new property law — even though it won’t take effect for another six months.

The two cases obviously aren’t parallel. Cui is a migrant worker who has received a suspended death sentence for killing a government official; Wu Ping, who owned the nail house, was seeking compensation for the destruction of her house and business. That the press coverage of Cui would focus on the issues of migrant workers and the death penalty is to be expected.

But property rights are central to Cui’s misfortune. Everything he owned, including his means of livelihood, was about to be confiscated without compensation. That such a prospect would drive him to violence is not surprising, and the omission of property rights from the public discourse about Cui raises the question of whether property rights in China will function only for the affluent. The concept of property rights is easy to grasp in the case of land, but it may prove more elusive in the case of the personal property a migrant worker needs to earn a living.

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