SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Over the past three decades a progressive transformation of the law and legal institutions in China took place as part and parcel of China’s broader modernization process driven by economic reform and development. The recognition and protection of private property as embodied in the amendment of the 1982 Constitution, the 2007 Property Law and other legislations, is one of the stories contributing to the transformation of modern Chinese law and legal institutions, which relects a historical modernization process of socio-economic change in contemporary China. However, this study by examining the development of a legal framework for the protection of private property, the problems related to urban housing demolition, and the rule of law in relation to the protection of private property, submits that the legal modernization in the protection of private property had no radical departure from, but conined within and compromised with, China’s current existing systems which, among others, still uphold socialist ideology and practice.