Ten Principles for a Rule-Ordered Society
by Martin Krieger
Shui Yan Tang, Ten Principles for a Rule-Ordered Society, Enhancing China’s Governing Capacity 2012 China Economic Publishing House
The principles are, in my words: make it easy to follow rules; rules should be clear; informal rules help formal rules; create expectations that all will follow the rules; enforcement is sensible and fair; rules are suited to the problem; rules are made and applied close to the relevant community, in scale and power; there are procedures for resolving conflicts in applying the rules; those who enforce rules are constrained; rules encourage “self-interest rightly understood” (a la de Tocqueville).
The principles only make sense when they are given substance through lots of examples. Tang provides them.
The book is short, less than 80 pages, but is actually twice as long since the English and the Chinese are on opposing pages. It is learned and down-to-earth, theoretical and practical.
Right now, it is not easy to get, since it was published in China. But I hope it finds a Western distributor before long.
MK