A group of Chinese scholars and retired officials has petitioned China's legislature to halt the privatisation of state companies, arguing it has widened the country's income gap and fueled social unrest.
The petition strikes a discordant note just weeks before the annual session of the national legislature, a time leaders of the communist government usually emphasise unity and consensus.
In a possible sign of official disapproval, many of the Chinese Web sites carrying the petition - accessible when it was first posted last week - had been blocked by Tuesday.
The sharply worded appeal criticised a decade-long program to privatise state companies, saying it had allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in assets to fall into private and foreign hands. Such privatisation, it said, violates the constitution and must be stopped to curb spreading social unrest.
"With the unceasing advance of privatization, our country already has a serious gap between rich and poor, which is polarising into two extremes," said the petition, which claimed to have attracted 3,000 online signatures.
It cited growing protests in recent years as evidence of "a rising wave upon wave of voices opposed to privatisation."
Discontent has been especially widespread in China's poverty-stricken countryside, where peasants have led violent demonstrations against losing land and their livelihoods to make way for factories, shopping malls and other developments. Many rural residents say they have not been given promised compensation for lost land.
Opposition by left-leaning economists and officials scuttled adoption of a much-contested law to protect private property at last year's session of the National People's Congress. The legislature's executive body has since revised the bill, and backers have called for its inclusion on the agenda of the upcoming session, which opens March 5.
The online petition "is intended to check the passage of the property law," said Han Deqiang, one of the signers and an economist at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
How much legal protection to give China's growing private sector has become a crucial and divisive issue for China's leaders. With private businesses generating larger shares of jobs and wealth, the government is under pressure to nurture the sector's growth by affording it equal legal footing to the state-run enterprises that once dominated the economy.
That has angered retired officials, economists like Han and other academics who believe that the state should maintain a strong hand in the economy to protect the public interest and prevent the re-emergence of a capitalist class.
The proposed property law would solidify privatization that has benefited a class of entrepreneurs and officials at the expense of the public, said Han, a frequent critic of government policies.
"The property law basically takes all the illegally gotten income and legalises it," Han said. "So the congress delegates ought to block it."
The petition does not explicitly mention the revised property law. But it calls for the adequate protection of state assets and lists current constitutional preferences for state ownership.
Among the signers were retired consultants to the government's leading think tank, a former head of the National Statistics Bureau and a slew of academics from the Central Party School, a training academy for up-and-coming leaders.
Though he declined to identify the initiator of the petition, Han said the appeal originated two months ago with people connected to the Web site Mao Zedong's Banner, at http://www.maoflag.net. The site, named after China's revolutionary founder, is a forum for leftist debate that has angered the party's more centrist leadership in recent years.