My fieldwork uncovers the differing dynamics of the homeowner self-governance movement in three cities: In Shanghai, 94 percent of condominium communities have established homeowners’ associations (HoAs), compared with 41 percent in Shenzhen and only 12 percent in Beijing. In this chapter, I present a framework with two variables, the risk to social stability and state capacity, to explain the different styles of authoritarianism in the three cities, and examine the role of the local state in the development of HoAs.

The extant literature on the liberal commons takes as granted secure property rights, freedom of association, and the rule of law, all of which have been the exception rather than the rule throughout human history, and therefore fails to explore the origin of the liberal commons (from an illiberal regime). Authoritarianism poses a fundamental challenge to, but also an opportunity to explore the origin of, the liberal commons. This chapter defines the authoritarian commons by examining the tension between authoritarianism and the liberal commons both theoretically and in the specific context of neighborhood governance in urban China.

Neighborhood democratization refers to homeowners’ efforts to create a liberal commons in an authoritarian state, or, more specifically, their wresting of control over their neighborhoods through democratic elections from management companies and developers, whose neighborhood dominance local governments often acquiesce in for a variety of reasons. This chapter defines neighborhood democratization, identifies its challenges, and argues that the success or failure of neighborhood democratization depends on how the party-state balances its demand for effective governance and the risk posed by homeowner mobilization and association.

This chapter, the result of extensive fieldwork primarily focusing on Shanghai and Wuhan, where the most significant lockdowns occurred, uncovers the unexamined role of Chinese homeowners and their associations in monitoring and resisting the party-state’s encroachments on individual rights during the COVID pandemic, a phenomenon I term “cooperating to resist.” This chapter demonstrates that the cooperation of Chinese homeowners, which was indispensable to the party-state’s ability to maintain its pandemic control measures, brought them the power to mobilize, resist, and contribute to an abrupt ending of China’s lockdown policy which the party-state’s top leadership had attached its legitimacy to.

Is the term “authoritarian commons” an oxymoron? No, it is not. It highlights the tension and interaction between homeowners and the authoritarian state. Total party-state control risks eroding party-state legitimacy simply through incompetence, whereas delegating service delivery to independent-minded middle-class residents can endanger party-state control. Overall homeowners appear to represent the best chance of democratizing urban governance in Chinese megacities. Homeowners’ associations have been a rare form through which Chinese citizens can get associated and have real elections recognized by law and respected by the government.

This chapter provides a legal explanation for the different homeowners’ association (“HoA”) rates in Shanghai (94 percent), Shenzhen (41 percent), and Beijing (12 percent). Despite China being a unified regime with national law that is supposed to apply across different parts of the country, the local rules applicable to HoA elections differ across the three cities. Beijing has consistently followed national law, whereas Shenzhen adopted its own legislative rules until the passage of the Civil Code in 2020, at which time local rules gave way to national law, and Shanghai has left the choice to individual neighborhoods, with its courts relying on the idea of autonomy in private law to justify local practices that contradict national law. Both the national rule adopted in Beijing and the city rule adopted in Shenzhen have imposed significant decision-making costs on the establishment of HoAs, as well as collective governance problems ranging from parking space allocation to building maintenance. By contrast, the Shanghai approach, that is, allowing homeowners to write their own voting rules into HoA constitutions to reduce decision-making costs and using the courts to safeguard procedures and minority interests, contributes to functioning neighborhood democracy in Shanghai.

The homeowners’ movements in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen differ by both the scope of their property rights claims and the concomitant ways in which they claim those rights. The leading homeowners in Beijing are political entrepreneurs, devoting themselves more to systemic change and even Chinese democracy than to the self-governance of their individual neighborhoods. The leading homeowners in Shenzhen are social entrepreneurs who navigate through the social, legal, and bureaucratic maze to claim absolute homeownership sovereignty. The defining characteristic of homeowners in Shanghai is respect for laws and rules.

Based on a unique dataset of questionnaire survey about Chinese homeowners, I found that democratized neighborhoods have enjoyed better governing outcomes than have their nondemocratized counterparts, while also showing that the local government played a helping hand in establishing HoAs and thereby afforded neighborhoods mechanisms for self-governance. I also found that homeowner activists in democratized neighborhoods developed greater trust in the local government and deemed local officials both more supportive of neighborhood self-governance and less likely to collude with real estate management companies and developers than was the case within non-democratized neighborhoods.

Despite the increasing academic interest in how the party exerts control, there has been little research on how individuals or entities resist such control. This article provides an up-to-date ethnographic account of the evolving relationship between homeowners’ associations (HoAs) and the party-state in China. Drawing on interviews and archival research, I find that while the party-state attempts to penetrate the homeowner self-governance institution, homeowners in China have exhibited increasingly direct and effective resistance to the party’s efforts in three ways, including evasion, collective petitions, and legality reviews. My research underscores the potential of homeowners to defend their right to self-governance from party infiltration in today’s increasingly authoritarian China.