Author
Assoc Prof Wei-Hua Hao
Organisation/Institution
China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL)
Country
CHINA
Panel
Legal Pluralism
Title
Governing the Collective from the Top and from the Outside: A Reflection on China’s Property Regime in Rural Land
Abstract
Ideally, Elinor Ostrom (1990) defines collectives as self-generated, self-organised groups who take care of common resources collectively. In China, however, we developed the multiple meanings of collectives during the seven decades of legal evolvement: the quasi-administrative organization during the 1950s collectivist campaign, the agricultural grassroot groups in the first era of 1980s reform, and most recently, a special legal entity under the Civil Code. The logic behind these arrangements reflects a deep-rooted obsession with control by the state, as well as a clash of beliefs and legal norms among the rural/urban societies. Boundaries of collectives are deliberately designed to be ambiguous in a divided property rights system. Further, complexities of official representation inevitably result in peasants’ struggle with their membership in the collectives and exclude them from full access to property rights. My intention is this paper is to clarify the origin, the internal and external structure, and the consequences of the collectiveness in rural property rights in land. Within the bundle of rights in collectively owned or utilized land, the core is to possess, or the use-rights. Exclusion to a full range of property rights is the prevailing feature of the collective arrangements. In most of the collective rights in land, the collectiveness is attached to the status of the people who live in our land. Borrowed from some successful cases of self-governance in collective across Asia, like those agrarian communities in Japan, or the fishery communities in Indonesia, I suggest the collective regime in China may evolve into well-regulated, self-organized entities, too. At the end of this paper, I propose the more traditional, property-focused proposal relies on an increased focus on enlarging the right of possession, or reforming the usufructuary right, whose limitation is inalienability.
Biography
Associate Professor from China University of Political Science and Law. I write on property rights, legal history and comparative law.
