The Fifth Session of the Tenth National People's Congress (NPC) convenes its second plenary meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 8, 2007. (Xinhua/Huang Jingwen)  Photo Gallery >>>

The Fifth Session of the Tenth National People's Congress (NPC) convenes its second plenary meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 8, 2007. (Xinhua/Wang Jianmin)  Photo Gallery >>>

    By Xinhua writers Chang Ai-ling, Gao Feng, Ren Fang

    BEIJING, March 8 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC), on Thursday started examining two draft laws aimed to grant equal protection to state and private properties and introduce a unified income tax for domestic and foreign-funded enterprises.

    The drafts of the property law and the enterprise income tax law were submitted for deliberation to national legislators as they convened for their second plenary meeting of NPC annual full session at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Thursday morning.

    Enacting the property law is necessitated by the demand to uphold the basic socialist economic system, to regulate the order of the socialist market economy and to safeguard the immediate interests of the people, said Wang Zhaoguo, vice chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, while reading an explanation on the law to the nearly 3,000 lawmakers.

    Wang said under the conditions of the socialist market economy, the country's economic pattern stipulated in the Constitution, all players have equal status on the market, enjoy the same rights, observe the same rules and bear the same responsibilities.

    "If the different subjects of the market are not provided with equal protection, or if the methods used for settling disputes or the legal responsibilities to be borne are varied, it will not be possible to develop the socialist market economy, nor will it be possible to uphold and improve the basic economic system of socialism," he said.

    As part of the draft civil code, the property law was submitted to the NPC Standing Committee for the first review in 2002 after nearly 10 years of preparation.

    After an unprecedented seven times of reading, NPC Standing Committee decided last December to put it for voting at the Fifth Session of the Tenth NPC, believing that the draft "represented a crystallization of the wisdom of the collective and was about to be mature".

    China's legal experts believed that the draft reflects China's basic socialist economic system and will help coordinate the interests of different groups and improve social harmony once adopted.

    Wang Jiafu, a civil law expert, said China's state and private properties once suffered serious violations due to ignorance and neglecting of property rights.

    "The equal protection of the state and private enterprises will greatly boost Chinese people's enthusiasm to create and protect wealth," said Wang, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

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