The Beijing Consensus? How China Has Changed Western Ideas of Law and Economic Development

(funded by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier1)
by Assistant Professor Chen Weitseng

The Beijing Consensus remains a contested concept, if not controversial. One may argue if public ownership fits the market economy and helps maintain macro-level stability, why rush to secure private property? If private banks and insurance companies are too big to fail and require public bailout when in crisis, why privatize SOEs in the first place? The list of doubts may go on and on but it reveals more ambiguity of the Beijing Consensus than exact configurations of legal institutions and relevant practices.

The goal of this international workshop is to interrogate this Consensus, if any, from a law and development perspective, with a comparative framework that incorporates experiences of other Asian economies such as Singapore, Japan and Taiwan. Particularly, we aim to bring in not only theoretical analyses but also insights from market and legal practices. This is because most discussions at the moment are divided by disciplines; briefly put, legal scholars examine overall rule of law reforms, political scientists and economists focus on policies touching various dimensions of the state capitalism, while lawyers execute all of the reforms. More dialogues are greatly needed. We intend to create such dialogues by examining the institutional arrangements manifested in legal and market practices to date, in areas such as tax, securities, corporate, health care, property rights, financial institution, trade and foreign investment laws, the exact subjects that define the rival concept Washington Consensus.

We conclude there is no fundamental difference between the two competing concepts, despite various nuance in terms of sequencing and implementation in respective legal areas. Nevertheless, the implications of the Beijing Consensus will be of great value for contemporary legal theories, all of which are mainly based on the free market paradigm and have not yet been carefully scrutinized in the Asian context. We believe an interdisciplinary dialogue, with insights from the market practices, is the key to close the gap. The conference papers have been published by Cambridge University Press in an edited volume entitled "The Beijing Consensus? How China Has Changed Western Ideas of Law and Economic Development (Weitseng Chen ed., 2017)."

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