China’s plan to force private residential compounds to open to public is ‘illegal’: lawyers

Legal experts say a central government plan to open the mainland’s gated residential communities to the public will infringe on residents’ property rights.

A State Council directive said on Sunday that gated communities and government compounds would be gradually made accessible to the public, and their roads opened to traffic.

No further gated communities would be built and all new developments would have to follow the public street grid system, it said.

The council said the move would improve traffic networks and make better use of land.

However, Xu Xin, a law professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said the policy was unreasonable and illegal. He said it was “a natural result of the long-term confusion between public and private domains, plus a lack of protection for private property”.

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“Gated communities that have already been built are private properties bought by owners. The right to use roads within the boundaries of these communities is shared by all owners and protected by the constitution and the law,” Xu said on Weibo. “They have no obligation to open to the public and the government has no right to intervene.”