Chen Chih-jou (Chen Zhirou if spelled in pinyin transliteration) is an Assistant Research Fellow with the Institute of Sociology (Academia Sinica, Taiwan). This book is an outgrowth as well as an update of a former research launched in 1995 resulting in a doctoral dissertation at Duke University in 1997 and a publication in 1999 ("Local Institutions and Property Rights Transformations in Southern Fujian," in Jean C. Oi and Andrew G. Walder (ed.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China, Stanford, SUP, 1999, p. 49-70). Chen Chih-jou tracks down “the secrets of China’s economic reforms” and discloses to the reader “the corruption, the nepotism, the contradictions, and the evidence of the wealth grabbed by the elites at the expenses of the people” (p. 6).

The book begins with a brief introduction to contending theories by which various authors had explained the success of the Chinese economic reforms. Chen Chih-jou states that all these accounts failed to achieve their goals but create “empirical inconsistencies” (p. 11). None of them could explain how comparable achievements could be spawned out of different policies (e.g. here promoting private enterprises, there supporting collective enterprises)? This question sets the structure of the book which reports and analyses the author’s fieldwork firstly in Jiangsu province (chapters 2, 3 and 4) then in Fujian province (chapters 5 and 6). The author demonstrates that only a study of social institutions in localities help us to understand why divergent economic development strategies inevitably end in similar social stratifications, thus illustrating why entrepreneurial empowerment is rooted in local politics.

All along this book, some inconsistencies blur a little its pertinence. Chen Chih-jou identifies property rights to ownership right; actually the latter is a preset bundle of property rights – as described in the Chinese General Principles of Civil Law (art. 75) or in the French Civil Code (art. 544) – among all other property rights. Thus, for example p. 72, collective ownership should not be seen as a dedicated pattern of property rights, but as a common set of property rights (namely ownership right) benefiting to a collective owner (namely a local government). Furthermore, Chen Chih-jou mentions (p. 9, 183…) some « private property rights »; actually a property can be privately or publicly owned but the right to own such a property, i.e. the right to use it, the right to enjoy its fruits and the right to dispose of it, are neither private nor public.

These uncertainties in such basic concepts head towards further misunderstandings (p. 72, 82, 98…). Privatisation of state-operated production units does not inevitably lead to the establishment of non-publicly-funded firms as it is verified in China as elsewhere; privatisation is not a procedure through which ownership is amended from public to private but through which the managerial framework is reformed namely from public law to private law — if occurring, changes in ownership are incidental. It could have been worth searching how this framework through its flaws as well as its understanding by local cadres might have contributed to the shaping of property in rural China. As the clarification of property rights does not necessarily entail the reassignment of ownership, ill- or well-defined property rights does not mean that their limits are ill- or well-circumscribed in some given circumstances but do mean that their nature and properties are ill- or well-stated by law. It is the issue of the codification of rights in rem (wu quan) which still has not found its proper solution in China. It might have been not the reassignment of ownership in itself but its legal environment which might have fostered elite’s misdemeanours. Lucrous fever cannot alone explain everything.

Despite these reservations, the general gist of Chen Chih-jou’s line of argument remains true. Non specialists will appreciate this well-researched book written with an engaging and vivid quill. Specialists might find this approach interesting though not fully convincing.