Liberal Archive - China
2025.05.19

Why Do We Need an Archive of Chinese Liberal Thoughts?

2025.05.19

The Embers of Reform and the Sparks of Chinese Liberalism

China's reform and opening was driven not by the Communist Party but by Western liberalism and the free world's support; the Party tolerated it merely as a survival tool. Under Xi, censorship and recentralization enact a...
2025.05.19

Revisiting "Property Must Not Be Held in Common"

Revisiting Locke's maxim that property must not be held in common nor power in private, Mao Yushi contends that common ownership is really a system for sharing in others' property by force or stealth. Since "the public" ...
2025.05.19

Without Liberating Thought There Will Be No True Reform

China's economy is sliding—private investment down, state enterprises weak—and the recent Party document on property rights, though welcome, lacks sincerity without at least an apology for past expropriation. Mao Yushi...
2025.05.19

The Purpose of Public Power Is to Protect Property Rights

Commenting on the Kaixilai mining-rights case, Sheng Hong argues that public power's foremost function is to protect property rights of legitimate origin; a government that instead infringes them forfeits its economic ra...
2025.05.19

The Next Step of Reform: Restrain Public Power to Protect Private Property

Sheng Hong explains that property-rights theory—from Coase, North, and Steven Cheung—shaped China's reform: rather than converting collective ownership to private (politically impossible), reform changed contracts, giv...
2025.05.19

The Rule of Law Is the Core Technology

Technology cannot be stolen—only obsolete, materialized products can, not the "going concern" that produces knowledge, which depends on an institutional environment. China's real progress came from private firms under I...
2025.05.19

Viewing the Gap Between Ancient and Modern Institutions Through Chinese History from Qin to the Present

Sheng Hong offers three responses to Wu Si. On translating "rights," he finds quanfen still lacking in justice and proposes suoli, drawn from a classical phrase, since suo connotes the natural and fitting and li the bene...
2025.05.19

Sheng Hong: Why Study Ritual and the Common Law?

Drawing on Hayek and Confucianism, Sheng Hong argues that true law is not what governments enact but the spontaneous order glimpsed through custom, habit, and convention—what the Chinese call li (ritual). Enacted statut...
2025.05.19

How Should Liberals Defend Liberty? — Answering Duowei on Questions of Liberalism

Sheng Hong identifies with Hayekian liberalism—negative liberty grounded in spontaneous order from custom, not the French rationalist-constructivist kind that builds ideal structures by force. Liberty is won by each per...
2025.05.19

Power: Authority and Violence — Drawing Chiefly on the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Drawing on Arendt, Sheng Hong analyzes power as an institution for providing public goods, distinct from violence and from those who hold office. Power equals authority plus violence; authority—which wins voluntary comp...
2025.05.19

The Absurd Logic of "Anti-Constitutionalism"

Chen Zhiwu argues China's rapid growth through imitation created a "latecomer's disadvantage"—success bred the illusion that the existing system caused it, so political reform to constrain power stalled or reversed. Yet...