When homeowner associations (HoAs) emerged in China’s burgeoning housing developments in the late 1990s, they soon attracted scholarly study, seeming to hold significance little-seen in their equivalents in open societies. Here was a self-governing grassroots organizational form authorized by state policy. Homeowners often engaged in prolonged struggles – featuring showy protests, petitioning, the works – against rapacious developers and property management companies, and implicitly against the state backers of these firms. They held elections that compared favourably to the sham voting for the officially mandated residents’ committees. These associations, though fraught with infighting and other problems, stood out in a system jealously monopolized by the Party, and perhaps augured gradual change.
More than two and a half decades later, Shitong Qiao has written the most ambitious book yet on this topic. It has several special merits, starting with the author’s clear enthusiasm for the material. He situates it within a broader world of ideas, particularly liberal thinking (old and new) about the ways in which property rights underpin autonomy and democratic participation. Throughout the book runs the theme that Chinese city residents’ widespread ownership of apartments is bringing broader empowerment – increased authority over neighbourhoods themselves, as well as demands for a greater say in many other matters. Qiao takes these claims back to thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, whom he references at several points, and indeed the book has a certain Tocquevillian quality: broad, passionate, unafraid to draw sweeping conclusions.
As the French aristocrat noted: “Despotism, by its very nature suspicious, views the separation of men as the best guarantee of its own permanence and usually does all it can to keep them in isolation.” (Or, we might add, at least in Party-controlled collectivities.) Yet Qiao eloquently argues that, for all its distrust of HoAs, the Chinese state has no choice but to work with and concede some space to them. It cannot manage the myriad conflicts of neighbourhood life on its own. Having invested their life savings in homes, owners cannot be denied dominion over the allocation of parking spaces, the maintenance of elevators, the dog rules. These groups are thus much less vulnerable to repression than other sectors of civil society, he holds. The Party strives to keep them as contained as possible, but it only wins some of the battles.
That brings us to another strength of the book: the three-city comparison among Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen lying at its core, along with glimpses of other cities, including Wuhan and Zhengzhou. Intriguingly, deep differences among the cities have persisted over many years, both in the nature of the homeowner movement and the local government’s strategy for managing it. Beijing has been a hotbed of activists with ambitions not merely to regularize control of neighbourhoods but to achieve wider political rights and democratization, as Qiao tells it; accordingly, its government has been extra wary, allowing only 12 per cent of condominium communities to formally establish HoAs. Shanghai contrasts most dramatically. Its homeowner organizers have been prudent and legalistic, and the city has encouraged rather than suppressed the groups, so that 94 per cent of eligible neighbourhoods have one.
The book’s bold categorization of the cities may obscure quite a bit of nuance. Contention continues to play a role in all three, after all, and Beijing homeowners in certain neighbourhoods have achieved a lot even without official blessing. Still, this powerfully affirms the indispensability of city-by-city analysis in China. Qiao, a law professor, particularly shines in an extended discussion of the distinctive, pragmatic jurisprudence through which Shanghai courts have dealt with homeowner issues. He details the strategies these local courts have used to square a circle: though they have no right to interpret the Civil Code, only to implement it, they have seemed to win the approval of the Supreme People’s Court for their relatively permissive approach.
Apart from such sections referencing laws and statements of policy from the centre to the local levels, the book’s most compelling evidence comes from 224 interviews, supplemented by news accounts. One chapter reports findings from a web survey distributed non-randomly via activists’ WeChat groups, which seems shakier and also tangential to the book’s main points. This is not a very thick book, and it can leave the reader hungry to see more from the author’s research. Broad as it is, it doesn’t go much into certain key aspects of HoAs, such as the quality of association elections, nor does it entirely resolve others, such as the ongoing relevance of protests and contention.
Qiao does, however, extend the inquiry in several directions. Chapter seven explores the role of homeowners in the COVID-19 pandemic. HoAs, not just the official neighbourhood infrastructure, were important in making the lockdowns work, particularly by organizing food supplies, and also “played a decisive role in terminating those policies through their collective legal resistance,” the book claims (p. 100). Another chapter looks at Xi-era efforts by the Party to bring HoAs to heel by calling for Party members to constitute a majority on their executive committees. Qiao documents cases of homeowner activists successfully pushing back on such mandates. Still another chapter sets up a promising framework within which to consider the possible expansion of homeowner activism along two dimensions: beyond the neighbourhood, and beyond property rights. It presents some pieces of evidence on NIMBY actions against rail and highway projects; HoA conflict with residents’ committees; the forming of meta-associations at the district or city level; and HoA activists running for local people’s congress seats in the Hu Jintao era. But a longer discussion with more examples would be more satisfying and give a stronger basis for Qiao’s claims.
So, are HoAs leading to the kind of broader demands for power that theory envisions? Some of the evidence seems mixed or even, during the Xi Jinping years, discouraging. The author acknowledges the bleak parts of the record but, at every turn, comes down on the side of confidence that the liberal logic of empowerment through property will prevail. Regardless of how that pans out in the long run, this book provides a fine and lively overview of the state of play so far.
