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.

This chapter contains answers to the Questionnaire on Constitutional Democracy for Chinese Liberal Intellectuals, which covers the basic concepts and institutional designs of constitutional democracy. China’s most pressing task is not making a new and better constitution, but rather formulating social contract through implementing the existing constitution, which does pay lip service to many political natural law precepts. Unlike many admirers of the American presidential system, I advocate for a Westminster-type parliamentary system, which has largely been borrowed by the current Chinese constitution, to be embedded in a federal framework for future China.

With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1976, China entered the “Golden Age” of reform, which ended tragically within a decade in 1989. Deng’s Southern Tour launched economic reforms without its political counterpart, and created huge interest groups that have benefited from the authoritarian system, further hindering political reform. The Initiative for Building Consensus on Reform advocated comprehensive constitutional reforms to be taken for China to return to healthy economic development. Without political reform that makes the ruler accountable to the ruled, no matter how much freedom, wealth or half-baked rule of law enjoyed by the ruled, it can be taken away from them overnight, as the zero-Covid policy showed in 2020– 22.

The century-long predicament of Chinese constitutionalism lies not in its constitutions, but in the complete absence of social contracts as the legitimizing foundation of any constitution. Although the Xinhai Revolution did not shed much blood, it was carried out very much in a way opposed to the spirit of social contract. In less than two years after the establishment of the First Republic, the ill-fated political cooperation between Yuan Shikai and the Nationalist Party was fatally disrupted. The Treaty of Versailles ignited the patriotic fire overnight and set the stage for Communist ascendance. The frequency analysis of keywords from the Xinhai Revolution to the May Fourth Movement showed that anti-contractual concepts such as revolution, Leninism and socialism had been soaring, and had become a popular trend by 1919, leading to the establishment of the Communist regime in 1949.