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.

The law intends to offer the same protections for private and public property, a far cry from the first decades of communist rule when China preached common ownership and the state took care of housing, education and health care for its citizens.

Since economic reforms began in the late 1970s, those benefits have eroded severely, even as the private sector, including foreign investment, has grown to account for 65 percent of the gross national product and up to 70 percent of tax revenues.

State industries, meanwhile, have shed influence along with employees, with China’s labor minister saying this week that jobs need to be found this year for 5 million laid-off state enterprise workers.

Along with private businesses, the law also aims to bolster the rights of house buyers who have pushed the urban home ownership rate above 80 percent, as well as farmers who have frequently lost their land to infrastructure and housing projects with little or no compensation.

Despite those benefits, the law’s critics aren’t backing down.

“The law basically ignores the constitution’s upholding of socialist public property as sacred and not to be violated,” said Gong Xiantian, a Peking University professor who scuttled passage of the law last year.

Gong and his comrades are an important constituency for the nation’s leaders who need to maintain the historical legitimacy of communist rule while adapting to rapid social and economic change. Their message of economic fairness for poorer workers and farmers resonates with many Chinese and the Communist Party leadership.

Even the law’s backers concede the conservatives have sympathizers among the 3,000 delegates to the National People’s Congress which will vote on the law.

“Position on the issues are really polarized,” said Sun Wenguang, a retired Shandong University professor and close of observer of Beijing politics.

The law allows that, while all land still belongs to the state, individual use rights can be renewed automatically after terms of between 30 and 70 years. It lays out principles for compensation and delves into technical areas such as transfer rights and mortgages.

Most importantly, the law will erase the perception that public interest always supersedes the private, said Yin Tian, a Peking University professor who helped draft the bill.

“It sets the rules of the game,” said Yin. In answer to one major criticism, he said the law specifically denies protection to assets such as factories that fell into private hands though corruption.

Yang, the owner of the three-branch Beijing People Sunshine Pharmaceutical Chain Stores, said the law was a sign of a strengthening legal system that would boost investor confidence.

And with urban private home ownership levels reaching up to 80 percent, new owners such as Wu Weiran, a marketer for a German firm in Shanghai, said the law’s guarantees were much welcomed.

Others involved in disputes, such as compensation for homes being demolished for the expansion of a Shanghai airport, said they expect the law will help them.

Even after 14 years of debate and redrafting, the law is still sensitive enough for the government to try to limit discussion of it. After complaints from conservatives forced its withdrawal last year, the government now has presented a revised version with stronger protections for state assets.

Officials delayed publication of an issue of Caijing magazine that carried a cover story examining the debate, reportedly due to concerns it would prompt new questions.

Ahead of the congress, critics such as Gong collected more than 3,000 signatures for a petition posted online opposing the law. They continue to make their views known on Internet sites that speak of deep nostalgia for China’s planned economy.

“The appearance of the property law is a strong symbolic indicator of the transition from the proletarian era to the propertied era,” said one writer in an essay posted on the Communist Party newspaper’s Strong Nation Forum.

Yin and other supporters dismissed opponents of the law as out-of-touch ideologues.

“They don’t believe private property is worthy of protection,” Yin said. “There is no market for their criticisms.”

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