Yi Zhongtian, 易中天 writer and historian, in 2013 at a national conference of Chinese business leaders titled “A wish for private property right to be sacred and inviolable” (私人财产神圣不可侵犯); at the meeting he offers his reflection on and insights into the economic transformation, identifying the contradictions in the economic reform:
The rule of law and a free market, when intertwined and gyrating with one another, will fundamentally change the national character of the Chinese. This is because, when that happens, human relations would no longer be built on blood ties but gradually change to ones based on social contracts. This is a watershed between tradition and modernity. … Rule by law is predicated on a market economy. To have a thriving market economy is the only way to change the course of China’s future, to revitalize the nation and make China one in the family of great nations. Market economy is China’s salvation.
Why is rule by law so important and how important is it? It is so important that it not only influences all business developments in the future, especially those private businesses, but also shapes the direction of future developments of the Chinese civilization and psyche. It so happens that the term ‘rule by law’ is also closely connected with the key word ‘market economy’. We didn’t understand rule by law. Why? It is because our traditional civilization was one of agriculture or was based on the economy of individual farmers, not a market economy. The two most important distinctions between an individual farming economy and market economy are (1) market economy that requires clear property ownership, and (2) open trade. In traditional China from the dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou onward all the way to the present, there has never been clear property rights as far as I am concerned. … Why should there be clear property rights? There need to be private ownership of property, and there must be a thoroughgoing move to privatize? What do I mean by that? Properties must belong to the individual, something that has never been the case in our traditions. What system can we find in our traditions? The property ownership system in traditional China was the familial ownership, which was neither private ownership nor public ownership. This pot of land belonged to the family; when family grew in size and number, property was divided up into families, but never to the individual. There are family properties. … Now there have been tons of social problems, ‘moral degradation’ or ‘the loss of simplicity’ or what have you, that result from the changes in our modes of production and economic structure. What is going to happen with market economy which requires, as I just said, clear property rights to the private individual? When each individual becomes an independent entity, he acquires two distinct characteristics: independent human dignity and free will. What do we mean by independent dignity? It means that I am no longer affiliated and subordinated to anyone, and my personal dignity cannot be violated. This inviolability of my personal dignity is predicated on the inviolability of the right of private property ownership. … This explains the truism in the West that rain and wind can come into my humble abode but not kings. Likewise, there is also a humble abode in the inner recesses of us all called ‘human dignity’, which rain and wind can enter but not kings. The prerequisite of this personal dignity is the protection of the right to property ownership of the private individual. This is because only when the private individual owns property can he develop independent personal dignity. … What makes the Orient totally different (from the West) is rule by law; people are equal by law. After Westerners drew up social contracts, they realized there was a problem: could every issue be settled by law? For example, the law cannot settle scientific issues. When it comes to problems in the natural sciences, who was to say what was right or wrong. Academics cannot settle their disputes in court. Therefore, there was the third contract to be drawn, between Man and Nature. We all agree that one plus one equals two, and that the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is a straight line. Such are agreements that everybody recognizes, referred to as axioms if they do not need to be verified. That which are based on axioms are theorems; using theorems to reason is called hypotheses. Once a hypothesis is proven true, it is called truth. Once a truth is accepted openly and officially by everyone, everyone is equal when they signed a social contract based on this accepted truth. This is called equality guaranteed by and based on (1) social contract, (2) law, and (2) truth. But there is still one more problem, and that is the problem of morality that is not up to science or law. So, there must be a fourth contract (4) in the West between Man and God. … The rule of law and a free market, when intertwined and gyrating together, will fundamentally change the national character of the Chinese. This is because, when that happens, human relationships would no longer be built on blood ties but gradually change into social contracts. This is a watershed between tradition and modernity. … Rule by law is predicated on a market economy. To have a thriving market economy is the only way to change the course of China’s future, to revitalize the nation and make China one in the family of great nations. Market economy is China’s salvation.
Xu Youyu: On Liberalism, Changchun Publishing House, 1999, p.289, 2013
The core of liberalism is an affirmation of the value and respect for the individual, and of the needs to respect the interests and rights of the individual. …What liberalism emphasizes and proselytizes in particular is the dignity and rights of the individual, believing that men are born equal, endowed with the right to personal freedom and private property, absolutely free to do whatever they want so long as it does not infringe the freedom of others. So conceived, liberalism believes that the protection of the individual’s freedom to be the ends for the political, economic and social life of the state, that the function of the state is not to interfere or control the life of the individual but use Law to maintain order and eliminate factors that harm personal liberty. Based on that belief, the power of the state should be very limited, to achieve no more than the objectives above. Since power has monopoly and expansion tendencies, the power of the state ought to be delegated by different institutions, as checks and balances for each other. The state is not responsible for providing leadership for economic production or distribution of wealth. Its duties are limited to legally protecting fair and free competitions of its citizens
徐友漁《重提自由主義》，長春出版社，1999.“自由主義的核心就是對個人價值和尊嚴的肯定，對個人權利和利益的尊重和保護。… 自由主義特別強調並大力維護個人的尊嚴和權利，認為人生而平等，天然具有支配自己身體和財產的權利，在不妨礙他人的前提下，有一切行動的自由。基於此，自由主義認為國家的政治、經濟、社會生活，以維護個人自由為最終目的，國家的作用不是干涉或支配個人的生活，而是用法律文手段維護秩序，以排除對於個人自由的妨害。因此，國家的權利應該相當有限，僅僅達到上述目的為界。由於權利具有擴張、壟斷的自發傾向，因此國際權力應該分屬不同機構，相互之間形成監督和制約機制。國家並不負責有指導經濟生產，分配資源的責任，其職責僅為以法律保護公民在公平基礎上的自由競爭。”quoted in Chinese Social Thoughts over the last Four Decades, by Ma Licheng, Oriental Press, 2015; 《最近四十年中國社會思潮》，馬立誠，東方出版社，2015
Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, 2013
We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us. …In recent decades, market values have infringed on almost every aspect of life–medicine, education, government, law, even family life. We have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.
Recently, while visiting China, I learned that the line-standing business has become routine at top hospitals in Beijing. The market reforms of the last two decades have resulted in funding cuts for public hospitals and clinics, especially in rural areas. So patients of the countryside now journey to the major public hospitals in the capital, creating long lines in registration halls. They queue up overnight, sometimes for days to get an appointment ticket to see a doctor. The appointment tickets are a bargain–only 14 yuan (about $2). But it isn’t easy to get one. Rather than camp out for days and nights in the queue, some patients buy tickets from scalpers. The scalpers make a business of the yawning gap between supply and demand. They hire people to line up for appointment tickets and then resell them for hundreds of dollars–more than a typical peasant makes in months. 雇人扫墓服务 professional mourners
In 2001, The New York Times published a story about a company in China that offers an unusual service: if you need to apologize to someone–an estranged lover or business partner with whom you’ve had a falling out–and you cannot quite bring yourself to do so in person, you can hire the Tianjin Apology company to apologize on your behalf. The motto of the company is, “We say sorry for you.” According to the article, the professional apologizers are “middle-aged men and women with college degrees who dress in somber suits. They are layers, socal workers and teachers with ‘excellent verbal ability’ and significant life experience, who are given additional training in counseling.” Film Up in the Air.
Historically, the close connection between insuring lives and betting on them led many to regard life insurance as morally repugnant. Not only did life insurance create an incentive for murder; it wrongly wrongly placed a market price on human life. For centuries, life insurance was prohibited in most European countries. “A human life cannot be the object of commerce”, a French jurist wrote in the eighteenth century, “and it is disgraceful that death should become a source of commercial speculation”. Many European countries had no life insurance companies before the mid-nineteenth century. In Japan, the first one did not appear until 1881. Lacking moral legitimacy, “life insurance did not develop in most countries until the mid- or late-nineteenth century”.
Globalization against Democracy: A Political Economy of Capitalism after Its Global Triumph, by Wu Guoguang, Cambridge University Press, 2017
This triumph means that as nearly all states have embraced the market as their fundamental economic institution, the market, as the rudimentary insitution around which capitalism os originated, organized and operated, has overcome its institutional obstacles and competitors to become virtually the only choice worldwide for not only organizing human material life but also influencing every aspect of human activity. … Such a change, in the state-market-nexus perspective, is quite natural, as the state-market-nexus makes the two sets of institutions mutually influence and alter each other’s organizational principles and institutional functions. This institutional codependence reinforces bothg the state and the market, but also distorts or reconfigures both via various methods of cross-fertilization. … Contrary to the prevailing celebration of the “end of history” through the ultimate victory of the market and democracy in the late-twentieth century, this book argues that the victory of the global market instead hinders the further spread of democracy over the world, and in particular impedes democratic transitions from existing authoritarian regimes.