BEIJING, March 11 — For the first time in perhaps a decade, the National People's Congress, the Communist Party-run legislature now convened in its annual two-week session, is consumed with an ideological debate over socialism and capitalism that many assumed had been buried by China's long streak of fast economic growth. China has generally stuck by its market-opening commitments to the World Trade Organization. Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, has allowed billions of dollars in foreign investment to flow into the once tightly protected financial sector.
The controversy has forced the government to shelve a draft law to protect property rights that had been expected to win pro forma passage and highlighted the resurgent influence of a small but vocal group of socialist-leaning scholars and policy advisers. These old-style leftist thinkers have used China's rising income gap and increasing social unrest to raise doubts about what they see as the country's headlong pursuit of private wealth and market-driven economic development. The roots of the current debate can be traced to a biting critique of the property rights law that circulated on the Internet last summer.
This is indeed going on right now, but it really is a small cadre of deputies who are pushing to roll back the clock. This cadre has sought to fight off many free market reforms (including China's recently passed new company law), but had pretty much failed to succeed until stalling the new property law. Private ownership of land is antithetical to communism so the new property law would have been a major stake through the heart of the old order. I see the failure to get that new law in place now as a blip in China's road to economic reform, not the end of it. China is not ready for property reform during this session of its congress, but it will happen soon.
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