Law Commons^™

Past Is Present: Urban Real Property Rights And Housing Reform In The People's Republic Of China, William D. Soileau

Washington International Law Journal

Since the early 1980s China has embarked on an ambitious program of reform in the systems of urban real property rights and allocation. In many respects, these reforms recall the policies of private property rights protection which prevailed in the early post-Liberation period of P.R.C. history, but which were subsequently abandoned in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. In the intervening thirty years, however, the system of "public" urban housing ownership and allocation deteriorated to such an extent that no one—neither the state, its agents, nor private individuals—had sufficient incentives to increase or even preserve these resources. Faced with …