From Identity to Contract: Community Dilemma in the Reform of Collective Property Rights System

China’s rural collective property rights are undergoing the reform of community-based shareholding,which is very different from the institutional arrangement of vague property rights in the past.It provides a legal basis for clarifying individual property rights,and also hopes to stimulate the vitality of the collective economy through marketization,but it ignores the importance of welfare rights.In the transition period,we observed that the responsibility goal of the collective economy has changed from providing community welfare for villagers to reducing public expenditure and safeguarding the interests of shareholders,leading to the governance problem of public service failure in the community.This paper puts forward an interpretation framework of “collective property rights reform — village community structure change — welfare rights dilemma”,and we believe that the village has differentiated from the original social community into a new economic community in the process of reform,and the inconsistency of the two goals leads to the lack of welfare rights.The historical development of China’s collective property rights reflects the “community dilemma” that highlights the internal tension between the economic rights (private property rights) of individual expansion and the welfare rights (public property rights) of social development.Finally,we consider that if rural village want to get rid of this “community dilemma”,it should try to avoid the formation of member differentiation in the process of collective property reform,so as to maintain a high degree of unity of the interests of collective members and ultimately achieve common prosperity.