Rethinking neighbourhood governance in urban China : framing and examining the role of homeowner associations

Abstract

Amidst the concurrence of economic liberalisation and political domination for more than three decades, a new mode of governance has emerged and consolidated in Chinese urban neighbourhoods. This study focuses on homeowner association (HOA), a newly emergent neighbourhood-level organisation in Chinese cities that plays a key role in neighbourhood governance. Recent studies mainly draw on two strands of literature, namely, private governance and civil society, to understand Chinese HOAs. However, a comprehensive framework delineating the power relations among the Chinese state, HOAs and homeowners, and the implications of the dynamic state-market-society interplay for neighbourhood governance remains lacking. Drawn on three streams of existing literature relevant to neighbourhood governance, i.e. urban entrepreneurialism, infrastructural power and private governance, therefore, this study attempts to position the discussion of Chinese HOAs in the state-market-society nexus by proposing three research questions: ⅰ) What are the driving forces, mechanisms and implications of rising HOAs in neighbourhood governance and why? ⅱ) How and why the Chinese state extends political control over HOAs? ⅲ) Would the agency of homeowners in terms of property rights consciousness affects the governance performance of HOAs in neighbourhood governance? To address these questions, this research carried out a comparative case study to investigate the development of HOAs and the distinctive characteristics of neighbourhood governance in two Chinese megacities, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Based on questionnaire survey data, semi-structured interviews, pre-existing questionnaire dataset, governmental policies and regulations and other kinds of secondary data (e.g. yearbooks, annual reports of HOAs, news coverage and archive data), this thesis employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to better clarify the dynamic state-market-society interplay in post-reform urban neighbourhood governance. First of all, the study contextualises the concept of state entrepreneurialism through the empirical analysis of HOAs in urban China, illuminating that a new mode of neighbourhood governance is shaped by the top-down state sponsorship and bottom-up local participation. Then, by building up the framework of infrastructural power and fragmented authoritarianism, this research scrutinises the extension of political control over HOAs and the resultant uneven reach of state power in post-reform Chinese urban neighbourhoods. Third, a quantitative analysis was conducted to investigate the sources and influences of property rights consciousness on community participation and the delivery of neighbourhood service, which are two key factors of HOAs performance in neighbourhood governance. This study contributes to the extant literature in the following main areas. First, this study finds that the transitional neighbourhood governance in urban China in which multiple stakeholders get involved in the process of interaction and decision-making is actually under the orchestration of state entrepreneurialism. In this sense, this research contributes to the study of urban entrepreneurialism by explaining entrepreneurial governance of extra-economic activities at the neighbourhood level. Second, this study reveals that the effects of state penetration into HOAs are moderated by the ineffectiveness of grassroots apparatuses and varying degrees of heterogeneity of the homeowner society, implying that the emerging mode of state-HOA relation in post-reform urban China should be regarded accurately as entwining interplay between the non-monolithic party-state and the diverse society. Third, this research highlights the importance of homeowners’ agency in driving them to participate in neighbourhood issues and HOAs, which contributes to the theory of private governance both empirically and theoretically. This study not only makes a detailed explanation of the changing rationales of neighbourhood governance orchestrated by the state, driven by the market and involved by the society, but also develops a better understanding of dynamic interactions and variegated consequences of transitional neighbourhood governance in post-reform urban China.