What Are Property Rights Good For? Surprising Lessons from the Chinese Experience
Files
Description
When asked a few weeks after his dignity statement before the National People’s Congress on 5 March, 2010, Premier Wen elaborated: “When I said I ‘want all people to live with more dignity,’ I meant mainly three aspects: first, every citizen should enjoy the freedom and rights they are entitled to under the constitution and the law. Regardless of who it is, in the eyes of the law, everyone should enjoy equality. Second, the ultimate goal of Chinese development is to satisfy the increasing material demands of the people, there is no [goal] other than this. Third, society’s complete development must be based on people’s individual development. We want to give people freedom and complete development to create profitable conditions, let their wisdom and skills compete to burst forth. That was what I meant by dignity.” We can roughly characterize these three elements of dignity as legal equality, material sufficiency, and individual human flourishing. Although there remain millions of desperately poor Chinese, the PRC has made remarkable progress toward satisfying Wen’s second element. Progress on the other two elements remains uneven, ironically, perhaps partly because material progress has been so rapid. What many advocates of development fail to realize is that economic growth means change, and change, even in the form of material progress, creates losers as well as winners, destitution as well as affluence, and frustration as well as opportunity This chapter considers whether robust property rights could contribute to the alleviation of some of that pain. In doing so, it considers how property rights may give Chinese the sense of dignity referenced by Wen and that some Western legal philosophers consider intrinsic to law. Before we get there, however, we need to review what most people expect of property law, which is the facilitation of economic growth, not the provision of human\ dignity. We compare the Chinese experience with common assumptions about property rights in society and find that property has not contributed to economic growth in China. In other words, it has not been careful enforcement of property rights that has helped “satisfy the increasing material demands of the people” in Premier Wen’s terms. We also review recent Western scholarship describing roles for property unrelated to economic growth but directly related to concepts of human dignity and speculate how these roles might operate in Chinese society and specifically how property rights could respond to Wen’s call for enhanced opportunities for the “people’s individual development.” We conclude by departing from the celebration of dignity both by Western philosophers and the Chinese Premier and use contemporary American criminal justice to ask whether a legal system focused on individual human dignity may paradoxically threaten other perspectives on justice, perspectives from which China appears more successful than it does in dignitarian terms.
Source Publication
Rethinking Law and Development: The Chinese Experience
Source Editors/Authors
Guanghua Yu
Publication Date
2013
Recommended Citation
Upham, Frank K., "What Are Property Rights Good For? Surprising Lessons from the Chinese Experience" (2013). Faculty Chapters. 1448.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1448
