Paths Toward Property Right : A Comparison of Rice Market in Eighteenth-Century China and Japan

This paper examines the formation of property rights in Qing China and Tokugawa Japan with a focus on rice market development. Both nations’ citizens eat rice and rulers in both nations view rice as one of the nation’s most significant strategic resources. However, by the end of 18th century, Japan offered and well-carried legal property rights to rice market participants, while China only created weak form of property rights to rice market participants. We developed a multiplayer subversive regime game model to explain the deep-rooted reasons of this significant divergence. Supported by historical evidence from Qing China and Tokugawa Japan, we find that with lower suppression capacity and high risks of domestic threat power, Edo Japan’s ruler was more likely to offer legal property right protections than the Qing Emperor, resulting in boom of Japan’s rice market and lower need of its participants to invest in informal property protections. Moreover, our analysis suggests that a state’s relative strength matters the most when it determines its attitude toward property rights, which further influences the state’s stability and existence