Property Rights, Commodification, and Land Disputes in Contemporary Socialist Asia
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Description
China is in its fourth decade of rapid economic growth. Vietnam is close behind. With this growth has come massive social change that, whatever its ultimate net benefits, has created legions of losers: individuals, groups, and communities that have had the framework of their lives destroyed, in many instances through the destruction of their rights in land and homes. As with such people throughout history, the losers in Vietnam and China have not always gone quietly; on the contrary, loss of land, whether farmland taken for expanding cities or urban apartments taken for commercial development, has become both countries’ greatest source of social conflict. The reason is simple: more than perhaps any other social good, property rights, and especially property rights in land, are radically multidimensional and cannot be easily commoditized. With few exceptions, land not only has economic value—what is seen by the expanding cities and urban developers—but also provides the basis for social relations and in many ways constitutes those relationships through the creation of individual, group, and community identities. Furthermore, when land must be transferred or transformed to allow economic growth, the process implicates not only the mechanism of market exchange, but also the social, legal, and bureaucratic institutions that structure political power. This chapter tries to deepen our understanding of these contemporary events in two ways. In the second section, I put them into historical and comparative perspective by demonstrating that they repeat patterns of conflict that date at least to the English Enclosure Movement of the fifteenth century and have recurred in periods of rapid economic growth ever since. In the third section, I use property theory to deepen our insight into the nature and persistence of such disputes. Although contests over possession and control of land implicate economic interests, interpreting them primarily through an economic lens is dangerously incomplete. The result of doing so is likely not only to fall short of the economists’ goal of market efficiency, but also to engender and at times institutionalize continuing conflict. In the concluding section, I turn to the disputes described in this volume and attempt to place them in the context of evolving legal systems by analyzing the efforts of the Vietnamese and Chinese governments to respond to the widening social conflict arising from land dislocation. I argue that bureaucratic and judicial responses must address not only the financial impact of land transfers, but also the normative and behavioral changes that are at least as painful and may eventually negate the economic benefits that were the goals of the policy changes that set the process in motion. While adequate compensation may be a necessary element of any effective response, a legitimate process that is flexible enough to address the diffuse non-pecuniary effects of dislocation may be essential to the long-term social harmony that is the rhetorical goal of both governments.
Source Publication
Resolving Land Disputes in East Asia: Exploring the Limits of Law
Source Editors/Authors
Hualing Fu, John Gillespie
Publication Date
2014
Recommended Citation
Upham, Frank K., "Property Rights, Commodification, and Land Disputes in Contemporary Socialist Asia" (2014). Faculty Chapters. 1447.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1447
