Collective Property Legal Regimes and The Evolution of Chinese Enterprise Reforms: A Historical Appraisal

Over the course of the development of Chinese economic reforms since 1978, a capital and often overlooked - especially outside China - role has been played by those collective institutions derived from the gradual dismantlement of the communes established during the Maoist era. Legal regimes governing collective rights over both land and enterprises, starting from the early 1980s, gradually empowered local communities such as villages and townships to foster, through leases and concessions, private-led economic initiatives. Under such premises, the Township and Village Enteprise (TVE) became, in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the leading forces of Chinese economic development, cutting through an economic planning system which still mostly adhered to Soviet-fashioned models. At the same time, China’s collective economy and the TVEs constantly sought a balance between theoretical frameworks of property rights rooted in traditional socialist legal theory - above all, the distinction between ownership and management rights - and the increasing necessity for a diversification of instruments able to grant families and private individuals (within and outside the community) the powers to undertake, profitably, economic endeavors. From such perspective, therefore, a historical appraisal of the role played by collective enterprises in the gradual transformation of Chinese planning and economic law is essential to understand how the current, highly diversified, regime of property rights in China came to be and determine which connections between market and planning contemporary Chinese enterprise law has been able to retain.