CHINESE TOWNSHIP - VILLAGE ENTERPRISES AS VAGUELY DEFINED COOPERATIVES

This paper concerns the paradoxes and dilemmas raised by Chinese township-village enterprises. The main purpose of the paper is to argue that a TVE is best described as a vaguely defined cooperative, meaning an essentially communal organization quite far removed from having a well defined ownership structure. The extraordinary success of the TVEs presents a severe challenge for traditional property rights theory, which we investigate in the paper. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.