The Strength of Property Rights, Prospects for the Disadvantaged, and Constraints on the Actions of the Politically Powerful in Hong Kong and China

Abstract

The contribution of property rights to the marginalization of disadvantaged groups is intensely contested and has important policy implications. A succession of influential scholars, particularly John Turner and Hernando de Soto, have asserted that stronger property rights for the informal sector or collectively owned agricultural land will have a variety of positive effects. Others assert that strong property rights contribute to social polarization at all scales from the local to the global. In this chapter, I argue that there is no single outcome of strengthened property rights. Instead impacts will vary according to the specific nature of the property regime being instituted, and in relation to the prevailing situation that is being transformed. During episodes of primitive accumulation, the protection of the property of those who are being dispossessed would clearly help to reduce or at least slow marginalization. However, when informal or even illegal access to the means of production or reproduction have become crucial to the survival strategies of the poor, the consequences even of new property regimes that promise secure rights to those who have previously encroached on public or neglected private land are far from certain, despite the assertion of influential proponents.