SMU Ho Bee Professorship in Chinese Economy and Business Public Lecture – China’s Property Revolution: Property Rights and Inequality in the New Market Economy
The 2013 Ho Bee Professorship in Chinese Economy and Business public lecture series was held on 26 November at the Singapore Management University (SMU). This year, we are honoured to have Professor Andrew G. Walder share his views on China’s Property Revolution: Property Rights and Inequality in the New Market Economy with Ho Bee Group Chairman & CEO, Mr Chua Thian Poh, alongside some 140 attendees.
Professor Walder is a Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. A political sociologist, Professor Walder has long specialised in the sources of inequality, conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states.
With the recent conclusion of the CCP’s Third Plenum, the Forum was indeed timely as Professor Walder spoke about the reallocation of property rights to organisations and groups; and how that led to new markets being created and new forms of economic enterprise emerging. He further illustrated his point through the transformations seen in three sectors in China—agriculture, steel manufacturing, and real estate. The restructuring of these sectors led to different allocations of property rights which in turn altered the stratification order in strikingly different ways.
Associate Professor Henry Gao, from SMU School of Law later joined Professor Walder at the panel discussion chaired by Professor James T. H. Tang, Dean of the SMU School of Social Sciences. the panel discussed topics ranging from social inequality in China to issues that surfaced following the Third Plenum.
Ho Bee Professorship in Chinese Economy and Business is organised by Singapore Management University in partnership with Business China and with generous support from Ho Bee Investment Ltd.