Article Decentralized and Anomalous Interpretation of Chinese Private Law: Understanding a Bureaucratic and Political Judicial System Yun-chien Chang† & Ke Xu†† INTRODUCTION China’s dazzling economic development in the past few dec- ades has increased the welfare of the Chinese people but caused headaches for legal and economic-development scholars. A widely shared view has been that delineation of rights is a pre- 1 requisite to market exchange and economic development. † Research Professor and Director of the Center for Empirical Legal Stud- ies, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. J.S.D., New York University (NYU) School of Law. Please direct correspondence to:
[email protected]. I thank Min-yen Tai (戴旻諺) for his research assistance. †† Lecturer, Renmin University, Beijing, China. A draft of this Article was presented at the Law and Society in China Sem- inar at NYU School of Law on November 21, 2016, the Symposium on Decen- tralization and Development at Hong Kong University Faculty of Law on March 14–15, 2017, and at the Faculty Workshop at Ocean University of China Faculty of Law on March 29, 2017. We thank Ruoying Chen, Jerry Cohen, Xin Dai, Kevin Davis, Richard Epstein, Cindy Estlund, Xin He, Rick Hills, Weiqiang Hu, Wendell Pritchett, Benqian Sang, Ilya Somin, Barry Weingast, Chenggang Xu, Ran You, and Lei Zhao for their helpful comments. Songtao Liu, the Director of ClassicLaw, kindly provided us with the needed data. Disclosure: Professor Xu is affiliated with ClassicLaw, which provided the data analyzed in Part II.C. Division of labor: Professor Chang came up with the research question.