American Legal Realism Goes to China: The China Puzzle and Law Reform

摘要

A Legal Realist inspired perspective sheds insight on how China has managed economic growth despite its lack of a formal property regime. China's traditional culture with its emphasis on Confucianism resisted the importation of a Western adversarial model of law while also providing China with the social resource of guanxi. China's tumultuous history impeded the rapid importation of formal rights because they conflicted with its political structure. China's emphasis on gradualism allowed the emergence of sociopolitical alignments of interests, which, at the time, better suited China's context. This was first manifested in the political logic of the dual track system.