BEIJING- To small businessmen like Yang Wenming, China’s milestone property law offers his privately owned pharmacies a chance for better legal protections against government interference.To an influential group of retired communist officials and scholars, however, the legislation is a threat to the state’s guiding role and a vehicle for unrestrained privatization they contend will feed a growing income gap between rich and poor.

The proposed law, which has been kicking around for 14 years, is all but certain to be passed by the national legislature Friday. But the debate highlights how private property remains a contentious issue nearly 30 years after China began dropping central planning in favor of free markets.

Prices of Bay Area homes were essentially flat last month compared with a year earlier, while sales volume fell to its lowest level for any February since 1996.The median price of all homes sold in February in the nine-county region - including resale and new houses and condos - was $620,000, according to DataQuick Information Systems, which gathers the data from public records. That’s up just 0.3 percent from February 2006, and up 3.2 percent from January.

In keeping with a nearly two-year trend of slower sales, just 6,305 homes of all types sold across the region last month, the fewest since February 1996.