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Over the past four decades, a picture of life in China began to emerge as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Deng Xiaoping opened its doors to foreign capital and developed into a global economic superpower. But the sheer volume of information and the lack of a cohesive narrative can lead to a disjointed and distorted view.

One important way to truly understand China is participatory observation and talking to its people on the ground, according to Shitong Qiao, professor of law and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar. A scholar of property, urban law, and Chinese law, Qiao’s recent work, including The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in January 2025, documents social and political changes in China through the lens of middle-class homeowners and its surprisingly powerful homeowners’ associations (HOAs).

Private homeownership is relatively new in China — its commercial housing market was established as part of economic reform — but the nation now boasts one of the highest homeownership rates in the world. Some 80% of urban residents own their homes, generally apartments and condominiums, and in the large urban neighborhoods of megacities thousands of homes are governed by HOAs.

As  in the U.S., HOAs represent owners’ interests in property maintenance and management and protect them against infringement of their rights by developers. But in China, they also function as a vehicle of neighborhood democratization.

Operating with the sanction of the CCP, HOAs give homeowners a degree of local self-rule virtually unseen in any other area of Chinese society. HOAs are, Qiao says, “the most exciting form of grassroots democracy in China.”

In “The Authoritarian Commons: Divergent Paths of Neighborhood Democratization in Three Chinese Megacities,” 71 Am. J. Comp. L. 388 (Summer 2023), Qiao describes how the dynamics between the authoritarian state and the liberal commons represented by HOAs in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai create an “authoritarian commons” where the party-state has ceded much of the responsibility for neighborhood governance to HOAs.

In “Cooperating to Resist: Society and State during China’s COVID Lockdowns,” Yale J.L. & Human. (forthcoming), Qiao reveals how HOAs in Chinese cities including Wuhan and Shanghai imposed constraints on the CCP’s power during the COVID-19 pandemic, resisting government infringement on individual rights, providing essential services to residents, and employing legal avenues to challenge and eventually end lockdowns.

Indeed, the durability and prevalence of HOAs in China challenges the notion that self-governing civic organizations cannot exist under an authoritarian party-state, Qiao says. HOAs have battled government and developers for control of neighborhoods, helped craft national legislation, and litigated in the nation’s highest court.

“Being law-abiding is not the same as obedience to authorities,” Qiao writes of one legal challenge in Shanghai, where 94% of condominium complexes have established HOAs. “[The] dispute was a neighborhood matter, but it was also a direct challenge to the Party’s leadership.

“This ongoing democratic revolution taking place in hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods across China is as yet incomplete. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the development of HOAs has already fundamentally changed how Chinese cities are governed.”

Qiao spoke on the remarkable level of self-governance HOAs enjoy, the social and political changes that property rights have brought about in China, and the importance of fieldwork to understanding China.

You describe the relationship between Chinese government and society in a very different way from how many Americans perceive it. It involves more power-sharing than many believe.

It’s not only Americans, it’s also many Chinese intellectuals. The view is that in China there is a strong state and a weak society, that the society was totally dominated by the state during COVID and also in ordinary times. My book and paper challenge this idea. After four decades of economic and market reform, the dynamic has fundamentally changed. Society has gained strength and power, maybe not as satisfactorily as many liberal intellectuals would like, but it is not like before.

It is particularly challenging to understand China today because there are lots of narratives from the government, lots of narratives from the media, and scholars are covering AI, industrial policy, the U.S.-China trade war, all sorts of stuff. My approach is that you have to understand what’s going on within China to understand all those things on the top. You have to talk to people to know what’s going on on the ground.

Unfortunately, doing fieldwork in China has become more challenging. So I think fewer scholars are interested in spending that amount of time in the field to find out what’s going on. That’s something we should do more.

In “The Authoritarian Commons” you write ‘A highly capable state facing an intermediate degree of risk can make the institutional reforms necessary to accommodate grassroots democracy.’ Why allow any level of democracy to take root?

It’s what I call the authoritarian dilemma. When we talk about democracy, sometimes we think about it in a very ideal, idealistic sense. But when I think about democracy or rule of law, I think about it from a very pragmatic perspective. Why would an authoritarian state want democracy? It cannot govern by itself. It needs to delegate. It does not have all the information, all the resources to govern — during COVID or even just in ordinary times. It has to delegate power to people on the ground, particularly in the urban neighborhoods, which are huge — several thousand people or more.

[That delegation] is a simplified version of democracy. We can call it a non-liberal democracy, basically, it’s a kind of means of governance, like collective decision-making but without commitment to all the liberal values. Delegating power to people, to homeowners in the neighborhood, basically means the government doesn’t have to spend any money and doesn’t have to hire people. The job is done and your legitimacy is upheld. So why not? That’s one part.

The other part is why I call it a dilemma. These civic organizations have their own resources and their own agenda. An authoritarian state, by definition, is worried about independent organizations that could pose a risk to the regime. So how do you balance the benefits and the risk? That’s very much central to my entire book project.

How did the balance play out in the context of the pandemic? From the outside, it appeared the government’s zero-COVID policy gave it complete control of every aspect of Chinese life.

In 2020 and 2021, people were arguing that the authoritarian state had responded to COVID much more effectively than democracies. That’s just a continuation of the conventional wisdom that China has a strong state and a weak society. What made the Chinese response effective was democracy — self-governance of Chinese people and their cooperation with the government in the neighborhoods. Democracy is also what constrained the state. You saw not really the strength of the government, but the limits of the government.

The real takeaway is that even during COVID in China, democracy won. Immediately after COVID, I talked to homeowners in big and small cities. I definitely witnessed the revival or the emergence of activism in these neighborhoods. Hospitals were one front in the war against COVID and neighborhoods were the other front. The government recognizes the importance of neighborhoods even more now, and the homeowners also understand the importance: ‘This is really our place, and if we don’t take control, we lose everything.’ So I think COVID was actually the beginning of a more active society because of COVID. Not necessarily a more confrontational role, but we’re likely to witness a more active role.

Does the Chinese Communist Party put any constraints on your research?

There are lots of constraints. I am fortunate that the book project started in 2017. That was a much easier time than today. Because I had already established connections with homeowner organizations in China before COVID, that made it really convenient for me to do my field work about COVID. That was just luck.

But I have to be very careful. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t talk to government officials much about democracy. I talked with them about how to improve neighborhood governance and the interaction between them, homeowners, and real estate management companies. Neighborhood governance is where the common ground is: if it can be improved, it serves the party-state’s interest and upsells its legitimacy.

And with homeowners, I talked about whether they have learned how to organize themselves, make a decision together, and treat each other as equals, without necessarily mentioning the word ‘democracy.’ You have to find a way of talking about things and not get too invested in overly charged words.

In the long run, I do think people’s ideas, people’s opinions, how they think about each other, how they interact with each other, if they have a spirit of treating each other as equals, of respecting democratic procedures … I think those are more fundamental. And when you boil down the rule of law and democracy to these daily elements it’s not threatening, even for government officials. If you tell them that a group of people sit down together and make a decision by a vote, Chinese people today generally have no problem with that. That’s what the market reform has brought to China.