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Based on six-year fieldwork across China including over 200 in-depth interviews, this book provides an ethnographic account of how hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners practice democracy in and beyond their condominium complexes. Using interviews, survey data, and a comprehensive examination of laws, policies and judicial decisions, this book also examines how the party-state in China responds to the risks and benefits brought by neighborhood democratization. Moreover, this book provides a framework to analyze different approaches to the authoritarian dilemma facing neighborhood democratization which may increase the regime's legitimacy and expose it to the challenge of independent organizations at the same time. Lastly, this book identifies conditions under which neighborhood democratization can succeed.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Theory: 1. Defining the authoritarian commons; 2. Neighborhood democratization; Part II. A Tale of Three Cities: 3 The three styles of authoritarianism; 4. Rule of law for democracy; 5. Property: a political right, social right, or legal right?; Part III. Benefits and Risks: 6. The origin of self-governed communities in authoritarian cities; 7. Neighborhood governance during China's COVID lockdowns; 8. Contesting party leadership; 9. Associations beyond neighborhoods and property; Conclusion: democracy in China?; Appendix I. Summary of research methods; Appendix II. Survey data and analysis.
About the author
Shitong Qiao is is Professor of Law and Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke University. He also taught property and comparative law at the University of Hong Kong and New York University and was Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University. He received his law degrees from Wuhan (LLB), Peking (MPhil) and Yale (LLM and JSD). He has published numerous articles in the top Chinese and US law journals and a prize-winning book about law and marketization, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Summary
This book is for students and scholars of law, political science, sociology, and economics who are interested in democratic theory, authoritarianism, marketization and democratization, property rights and development, and the relationship between rule of law and democracy, and for those interested in China's past, present and future.
Foreword
Based on six-year ethnographic research across China, it examines how millions of Chinese homeowners practice democracy and the party-state's responses.
