CHINESE TOWNSHIP - VILLAGE ENTERPRISES AS VAGUELY DEFINED COOPERATIVES

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