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To many Westerners, Chinese society seems squarely under the thumb of the Communist Party of China (CCP), the authoritarian regime that has been in power since 1949. But Shitong Qiao’s field research reveals a more fluid dynamic that has allowed a “grassroots democracy” to develop in some of China’s megacities.  

In his recent work Qiao, the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar and professor of law, explores how the CCP’s delegation of local governance to homeowners’ associations (HOAs) in urban China has given many residents of Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai a degree of self-determination virtually unseen in any other context. 

 “This ongoing democratic revolution taking place in hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods across China is as yet incomplete,” Qiao writes in The Authoritarian Commons: Divergent Paths of Neighborhood Democratization in Three Chinese Megacities. “Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the development of HOAs has already fundamentally changed how Chinese cities are governed.” 

For that article Qiao was awarded the American Society of Comparative Law’s Hessel Yntema Prize for outstanding work by a scholar under 40 years of age. His work was unanimously selected as the winner, a judge noted. 

Qiao, an expert on property and urban law with a focus on comparative law and China, has also written a forthcoming book on the topic. In this Q&A he discusses some of his findings and the challenges of conducting field research in China.  

As you describe it, the relationship between Chinese government and society involves more power-sharing than many Americans 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 happening 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.