The Analysis Of Property Rights Structure In Chinese Traditional Society Based On Confucian Communitarianism Cultural Perspective

This paper is designed to explore the history and development of Chinese institution of property rights from the perspective of Chinese traditional Confucian communitarianist culture, which serves as a basis to decipher the intrinsic relationship between conception and change of property rights during Chinese modern economic transformation.Firstly, the paper summarizes the research of Northian theory of property rights. It is summed up into three phases, namely the prophase focusing on the relationships between property rights and economic performance, the metaphase shifting to the cause of formation and change of property rights, the recent and now exploring how to carry on the institutional reform to protect property rights and realize the progress from a limited access order to open access order society. Throughout the Northian theory of property rights research, the fundamental beliefs of its property rights system is established on the most basic values of Western culture:to protect the rights of individuals and to achieve personal success. In contrast to the individualistic values, we can find that traditional Chinese Confucian culture constitutes a systematic difference from the Western. This leads to a starting point on studying the relation between Chinese culture and Chinese property right system arrangement. By doing so, this paper not only develops North’s research in the dimension of cultural comparison between the east and the west, but also may provides an constructive historical perspective for the study of transformation of property right system in the contemporary Chinese society.Although the Western mainstream cultural tradition may be an individualistic spirit, the traditional Chinese culture is totally different from the west culture. It is a kind of relational communitarianism culture under state regulation, which advocates the Confucian emotion of family kinship as the core and the "Differential Mode of Association" as the external form, which is presented in the hierarchical order of country. To understand Chinese people’s behavior, which is not fundamentally different from the Western communitarianism in methodology, it also requires a combination with their own history and grasps its essence in a specific social context and events. But once we systematically compare the values between the east and the west, we will find Chinese people depend on his or her relationships with others to act as not only the method of self- understanding, but more importantly, the way of self-achievement. Self-value is to be reflected in the requirements from other persons, and it requires is the support and recognition by the people who have special relationships with him. Traditional connection with home and country and the Confucian-oriented relationship of emotion and reason interrelate and constitute value proposition in Chinese traditional culture. It is the value root of Chinese property rights arrangements, which is obviously different form the values of the Western individualism. There may be uncoordinated aspects between individualism in western economic analysis methods and cultural values of this communitarianism.Taking "Relational communitarianism culture under state regulation" as a theoretical basis, Chinese traditional property rights arrangements, in theory, can be extracted into three hypotheses. Based on the "Differential Mode of Association", China has no absolute independence and equality of private property rights, but a kind of "differential order relational property rights". Based on the "extended self-value community", the individual in the "Differential Mode of Association" emphasizes self responsibilities and obligations, thus advocates "selfless". Based on the "state regulation", the state has the absolute authority in the distribution of economic benefits. In the traditional Chinese society, the above three hypotheses can be presented as follows:property distribution and management based on the family under government control; human capital oriented normative knowledge centered on interpersonal relationships, resulting in a mixture officials and businessmen, and slow industrial and commercial development; land ownership established way and its changes being consistent with the requirement of government tax, there being very unequal tax rate difference, rent-seeking frequently. All these verified the above theoretical hypotheses.Based on the traditional Confucian cultural view of relational communitarians to analyze Chinese traditional property right structure, its fundamental purpose is to better understand the characteristics of property rights in contemporary China’s economic development, and to provide some exploratory ideas for that market plays a decisive role in the allocation of resources. At the end of the thesis, we made a brief summary of full text, and prospects for the future.