Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.1, 2017

Experience and Transformation of Property Rights in Rural China: A National Governance Perspective Offering Food for Thought

(Abstract)

Deng Dacai

Property rights have multiple attributes and are moreover related to national governance. In the West, property rights have the economic attribute of maximizing efficiency and the political attribute of guaranteeing rights, but in China, they also have a strong social character. With the modernization of national governance, these attributes interact in a transformative way. When the state’s ability to supply public goods is relatively weak, property rights take on more of a social character, meeting public demand for welfare at the community level. When the state is better able to provide public goods, the social attributes of property rights lessen as their economic attributes grow. The social character of property rights is an institutional foundation enabling a huge agricultural country to realize “governance through non-action,” and also a property code to unlock the mystery of millennial continuity of Chinese agrarian civilization. Reforms including the collectivization of rural property rights after 1949; the “separation of two rights,” with its focus on rights to contracted land; and the “separation of three rights,” centered on revitalizing rights to manage the land constitute a process in which the economic attributes of property rights grow stronger while their social character dwindles under the conditions of national governance modernization.