The Advantages of Ambiguity? Development, Rule Formation and Property Rights During Transition in China

Abstract

Certainty and clarity of legally defined individual private property rights, protected by and from a constrained state, are doctrines of neoclassical economics-derived development theory. But absent these conditions, there may be alternative mechanisms to provide some protection for business development and property. Using a case study drawn from China, I will argue that collective, contested, ambiguous and perhaps absence of legally