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Local Resistance to Central Ideology: How Have Chinese Homeowners Contested the Party’s Leadership?
Qiao, Shitong
Qiao, Shitong
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36.4.4 Qiao Final.pdf
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Abstract
This paper examines the limitations of the contemporary Chinese state in enforcing its core policy and ideology, specifically the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”), at the local level. Similar to the Qing emperors’ embracement of low taxation as investigated by Professor Taisu Zhang, the contemporary Chinese state is also deeply entrenched in its attachment to the leadership of the communist party. The question this paper addresses is not whether the Chinese state can change its ideology, which, as Professor Zhang has argued in the context of historical China, can be quite difficult, but how capable the Chinese state is of enforcing its policy and ideology at the local level.
Drawing on interviews and archival research, this paper finds that while the Chinese state endeavors to institute the Party’s leadership in all aspects of the society, it has failed in its urban neighborhoods where hundreds of millions of middle-class homeowners, who are backbone of the regime, live. Homeowners in both small and big Chinese cities have exhibited increasingly direct and effective resistance to the Party’s efforts to establish Party leadership in homeowners’ associations (“HoAs”) in three ways, including evasion, collective petitions, and legality reviews. As it turns out, local politics and pragmatic needs can stand in the way of ideology enforcement, which might have been true in Qing China too.
In China, “the Party leads everything.” According to Article One of the current Chinese Constitution, “Party leadership is the most fundamental characteristic of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Scholars have examined the party-state’s efforts to incorporate Party leadership into charters of state-owned enterprises, raising questions of whether Party committees would and should play a direct role in corporate governance, the establishment of party units in non-government organizations,3] and Chinese branches of such transnational corporations as Walmart.4] It seems, indeed, that “the Party leads everything.” It is therefore somewhat incongruous that Chinese homeowners have been able to resist the Party’s effort to penetrate homeowners’ associations (“HoAs”). Though successful in sanctioning its leadership in Article One of China’s constitution, the Party has failed to establish full Party control over HoAs in face of considerable homeowner resistance, much of which has been in the form of legal action. This paper explains how and why this failure has occurred.