Communist China's legislature will almost certainly pass a key legislation increasing the private property protection. For many analysts, this move will come under the pressure of new private economic interests against the old political oligarchy. This interpretation makes this legislation appear as a progressive step toward turning China into a market economy without socialist adjectives. There are, however, alternative explanations for this unexpected move. Far from giving the people some extra protection against the powerful bureaucracy, the government already builds up exit strategies for preserving the top nomenklatura's economic privileges for the time when political monopoly on power won't be legally guaranteed.

After several years of discussions among the top communist party leaders in China, the state legislature is expected to vote a bill giving more legal protection to the private property owners. The first impression is that the government is finally realizing that such extra protection will provide additional stimuli for economic development, so needed for a country of more than a billion people that has still a long road before reaching the level of the richest nations. Officially, in China there are tens of thousands of rural riots each year, most of them occurring as a response against the administrative arbitrariness in taking lands for industrial, residential and other developments. These peasants, it's said, need more rights in order to protect their economic interests in a country that desperately needs land for new projects.

On the other hand, however, this protection may be needed for the top party officials that are becoming new capitalists fast. For them, this extra legal protection means that even in case of sudden and unexpected political turn they will be able to keep their property regardless of political monopoly on power, a legal arrangement that may be removed at some point in the future. This protection, and not that of the mass of peasants, may be the main interest beneath the new legislation. It just doesn't make any sense, when the government needs most of all to have free leeway in order to expropriate new lands for economic development, precisely in this moment to give extra power in the hands of the weak and powerless, and to block its own new economic projects. Especially when these weak and powerless are in no position for forcing the government to comply.

The fact that some conservative party cadres oppose the move shouldn't be seen as a sign that the new bill weakens the communist party as a whole and strengthens economic interests outside the current establishment. On the contrary, in a country where all economic interests must be represented only through the channels of one party organization, different economic groups by necessity need to coexist within the ruling party. Having conservatives opposing the bill doesn't mean that those who support it are democrats or liberals in the western meaning of the word. They are, rather, economic opportunists that look ahead for the time when political affiliation won't be the primary way of social promotion. Strong with the experience that they see unfolding in many ex-communist countries, they try to organize themselves economically and to create sufficient institutional stimuli, e.g. private property protection, which will serve their interests long after they forget about their current communist party membership.

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