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Abstract
Chinese homeowner associations (HAs) actions to protect rights have attracted scholarly attention due to beliefs that a new type of local governance or public sphere was being created from bottom-up representation in recent years. However, the current literature studies the impact of actions to protect the rights of HAs on community governance from different angles, but none have tried to analyze some structural factors that might have conditioned these. In general, they are descriptive or prescriptive, behavior-oriented, model-bounded, and case-specific. As a result, they are short of predictability or generalizability.
This essay examines the external and internal structural factors for actions to protect rights and combines them as a politico-economic reinterpretation with a focus on the internal governance structure. It argues, the external environment of actions to protect the rights of HAs exhibits a ‘political opportunity structure’, which has fueled the uprising of a rights-protecting movement. Meanwhile, the internal structure shows that the nature of an ‘incomplete contract’ for property transfer between developers and homeowners is a condition of the development of community governance and its performance. When combined together, this internal-external nexus leads to different explanations and to some possible solutions to improve governance for commercial housing communities in urban China.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Guo, Shen, and Chen, The Politics of Dwelling: Homeowner Rights and Community Building in Contemporary Cities.
2 Ibid. 19, 23.
3 Wang, “The Analysis of the ‘Autonomous State-Structure-Action’,” 146; Shi, “Relationship Network and Contemporary Chinese Grassroots Social Movement,” 76–88.
4 Wu, Politics of Housing Rights, 198.
5 Xu, “Reallocation of Power in Transitional Society,” 123–128; See note 1 above, 12.
6 Lei and Sun, Rights, Space and Civil society, 51.
7 See note 4 above, 173.
8 Jiang, “Migration and Dislocation,” 91–94; Xia, “Homeowners Convention and Homeowner Associations,” 133–140; Chen, “Urban Homeowners Legal Rights,” 34–63.
9 Zhang, “Beijing House Owners' Rights,” 1–39; Zou, “The Rights Movement,” 44–49; Guo, Shen, and Chen, The Politics of Dwelling.
10 Third party governance is defined by George Frederickson as “its precise governance roles and responsibilities are based upon formal contractual or grant documents upon which the contractor and the contractee agree,” and public nongovernmental governance is defined as “policy making and implementation by nongovernmental in situations or actors that bear on the interests or wellbeing of citizens in the same way and with the same consequences as state or jurisdictional outcomes,” see Frederickson, “Whatever Happened to Public Administration?”
11 Guo, Shen, and Chen, The Politics of Dwelling, 36.
12 Gerring, Case Study Research, 91–93.
13 Zhu, “Political Opportunity Structure,” 102–110; Sun and Song, “The Evolution of China's Environmental Resistance,” 134–139; Yuan, “Japan's Minamata Disease and Environmental Resistance,” 47–56; Wang and Bi, “Occurrence Logic of E-NIBY and It’s Governance,” 97–106; Li, “The Logic of Farmers' Environmental Resistance,” 123–128; Chen and Ma, “An Analysis,” 31–34.
14 Zhu, “Farmers' Rights Protection in the Perspective,” 96–100; Tong, “The Change of Political Opportunity Structure and Generation of Rural Collective Action,” 161–165; Zhou, Li, and Xie, “Analysis of the Causes of Rural Mass Events,” 9–15.
15 Ren, “Political Opportunity Structure,” 96–100; Chen, “The Chinese Logic and Governance,” 95–102; Zang, “The Impact of New Media Information Dissemination,” 51–65.
16 Zhou and Zeng, “The Opportunity Structure,” 1–33; Liu and Wu, “Taiwan Youth and the ‘Sun Flower’,” 10–18.
17 Huang and Gui, “Why Does Homeowner Cross-Neighborhood,” 88–117.
18 Xu, “An Analysis of the Relationship between International Non-Governmental,” 77–82.
19 Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Participation,” 28.
20 Ho, “Political Opportunity Structure and Social Movement,” 49.
21 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, “To Map Contentious Politics,” 17–34; Zhao, Social and Political Movement, 38.
22 McAdam et al., eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, 10.
23 Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder, 22–23; Tarrow, Power in Movement, 76–80.
24 Li, “The Legislative Participation of NGO Alliance,” 87–128.
25 Tang, “Incomplete Social Contract,” 63–95.
26 Williamson, “Transaction-Cost Economics,” 237.
27 Ibid., 248. Nonspecific but occasional transactions are ones for which buyers are less able to rely on direct experience to safeguard transactions against opportunism, as defined by Williamson.
28 North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, 28.
29 See note 24 above, 250.
30 Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies.
31 See note 24 above, 260.
32 Zhao, Social and Political Movement.
33 Zhao, “Revolution Occur in China Today?” https://www.guancha.cn/ZhaoDingXin/2013_01_04_118142.shtml
34 The other two are: labor rights-protection, and peasants’ rights-protection.
35 See note 1 above, 272.
36 See note 6 above, 53.
37 Zhu, “Political Opportunity Structure and Peasant Environmental Struggle,” 102–110.
38 Conducted on 2013/4/17 in Beijing.
39 Tong, “The Change of Political Opportunity Structure and Generation of Rural Collective Action,” 161–165.
40 See note 38 above.
41 Song, Research on the Group Events of Chinese, 135.
42 See note 37 above.
43 Shi, “Relationship Network and Contemporary Chinese Grassroots Social Movement,” 76–88.
44 Wang and Bi, “Occurrence Logic of E-NIBY and It’s Governance,” 97–106.
45 “Hainan Provincial Homeowners Association was Established,” http://haikou.gov.cn/zfdt/hkyw/201806/t20180603_1198270.html
46 See note 12 above.
47 See note 1 above, 176.
48 Such as Yingkou City Homeowner Association, Shenyang City Homeowner Association, Taizhou Hailing District Homeowner Association Federation, Suqian City Homeowner Association Federation, Hangzhou Xiaoshan District Homeowner Association Federation, Tianjin Municipal Homeowner Association, Shunde District Homeowners Association of Foshan City, Hainan Provincial Homeowners Association, Guangzhou Homeowners Association, Shanghai Homeowners Consulting Services Co., Ltd., etc.
49 See note 4 above, 5; In addition, according to the Beijing Newspaper Network, the Beijing court had handled 1573 disputes on homeowner associations in the past 5 years, https://read01.com/BnLGJJL.html#.XOs_J02P7IU
50 See note 6 above, 19.
51 See note 4 above, 17–18.
52 Ibid.
53 See note 21 above, 61–68.
54 Chen, Housing Property Rights and Community Government, 244–248; Chen, Owners' Choice and Autonomous Governance.
55 See note 21 above, 69–71.
56 Shi, “Quasi-civic Community: An Alternative Theoretical Model,” 59–70; Xia, “Homeowners Convention and Homeowner Associations,” 133–140; Huang, “State Strategic Actions at the Grassroots Levels and Community Processes,” 147–175; Xue, “Analysis on the Protection,” 59–64.
57 See note 1 above, 235–245.
58 Ding, Research on the Reform, 29–30.
59 Yu, Changes in the Neighborhood, 103; He, Country and Society in Urban Blocks, 136.
60 Li and Xu, “Property Owner’s,” 72–75; Chen, “Property Management and Owner Autonomy,” 92–95; Sun and Fan, “Community Co-governance,” 81–84.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jen-fang Ting
Jen-fang Ting is a professor at the in the Institute of Political Economy of Taiwan ChengKung University. His research interest mainly include cross-strait issue, local governance, and local politics. His papers have been published in Taiwan Democracy Quarterly, Political Science Review, Taiwan Studies, and other Chinese journals.
Shanwen Guo
Shanwen Guo is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Political Economy of Taiwan ChengKung University. He is also a part-time researcher of the Macau Monthly in Macau. His research interest is Social Governance in China, and issues concerning various Political Economy topics of Macau and Taiwan. His papers have been published in Macau Monthly, China Review and other Chinese journals.
Lingxin Liao
Lingxin Liao is a lecturer at the School of Accounting and Finance, at the Tan Kah Kee College, Xiamen University. Her research interest is Public Finance and New Institutional Economics. She is the author of Analysis of People's Environmental Behavior from the Perspective of New Institutional Economics — Ant Forest as an Example.