The Delineation of Rights and China’s Vast Transformation

ZiRan Yu ()
Additional contact information
ZiRan Yu: Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

Man and the Economy, 2022, vol. 9, issue 2, 81-104

Abstract: The transformation of China can be understood as a process of interaction between economic growth and national governance. Given that scientific technology and transaction costs are dominant factors affecting wealth accumulation, the control of transaction costs was the focus of China’s national governance in the premodern history of an agrarian-dominated economy with slow technological progress. China was the world’s most prosperous country thanks to the reduction of transaction costs through a family-based economy lacking property rights, a political structure of the family state, and an ethics-based social governance without law and jurisprudence. However, breakthroughs and progress in science and technology from Western countries brought subversive changes to the comprehensive strength of China. China was forced to transform. To take advantage of advances in science and technology and rapidly accumulate wealth, China moved from delineating human rights to delineating property rights as the main competition-restricting mechanism. The former hierarchical system and its ethics were replaced by a legal system that treated all people fundamentally equally. The revolution accelerated this change by abolishing inelastic customs and ethics that hindered modernization. Paradoxically, the Chinese Communist Party, as the main group that led the revolution, created a functioning system with a human rights structure of horizontal equality and vertical hierarchy for organization and mobilization that has allowed contemporary China to balance reform, development and stability.

Keywords: human rights; property rights; rent dissipation; transaction cost; transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/me-2023-0006 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:maneco:v:9:y:2022:i:2:p:81-104:n:1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/me/html

DOI: 10.1515/me-2023-0006

Access Statistics for this article

Man and the Economy is currently edited by Ning Wang

More articles in Man and the Economy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().