Property Rights In China

21 Pages 5343 Words

and to defeat all Western attempts to appropriate it conceptually. China did not collapse under central planning as the Soviet Union and has not collapsed under a mixed market socialist economy as Hungary and Yugoslavia. Instead, institutions and policies there undergo a constant evolution, remodeling Chinese social and economic landscape faster than scholars manage to write and publish their accounts of this change. Among the changing forms of this fluid landscape, a distinctly Chinese model is beginning to emerge – a model that increasingly puts into question the economic theories that dominate Western intellectual discussion.

No aspect of Chinese reality is more difficult for Western thinking to grasp than the social institutions underlying the Chinese economic miracle, notably the institution of property rights. The evolution of property rights in China has followed an idiosyncratic path, producing outcomes that pose a challenge to neo-liberal economic theory. Instead of disincentives and inequity, the evolving property right regimes in China seem to provide innovative solutions to fundamental problems in ways that no Western observer has managed to predict (Fei, 1992, p.111-112) In addition sociologies, such as Tam(2002) suggest that although many reforms emulating the new model have been successfully implemented into the Chinese system, the lingering influence of the old system has created a window of opportunity for corrupt and illegitimate activities to sprawl (p.304). This view is also supported by Ogden(2002) stating that the economic reforms since 1979 have “created a foundation of a greater democracy by increasing the number of rights.” This phenomenal progress, however, “has contributed to a breakdown in community cohesiveness and in law and order, as well as jeopardize[ed] the very social supports…that are important for China becoming a fair, decent, and strong society” (p.132-133). It is the contentio...