Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.4, 2018

A Ladder to Rights: The Property Rights Process and National Governance—China’s Experience as Seen in a Comparison of China and the West

(Abstract)

Deng Dacai

The property rights process involves the national governance and modernization of property rights. It comprises a clear horizontal process and an independent vertical process. The nature of a country’s civilization, its power structure, and the external pressures it faces are important factors influencing this process, and are also key to launching its vertical and horizontal components. Within the property rights process, the combination of the degree of horizontal clarity and vertical independence (horizontal and vertical clarity) and the ease with which the process is launched (its horizontal and vertical sequencing) will influence and determine the form of national governance, which will in turn affect the property rights process and its clarity and independence. The two are interdependent. An study based on the vertical/horizontal analytical framework of property rights shows that the UKhas a “democratic, power-limited” governance form, Russia a “coercive monopoly” form, and traditional China a property rights system that was advanced in horizontal terms but backwards in vertical terms, constituting a “moderately centralized” form of governance featuring horizontal norms and vertical adjustment.