Please join the China Law and Policy Association (CLPA) for a book talk with Professor Shitong Qiao, Duke University Law School, on his new book, The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Since the Chinese government carried out full-scale privatization of the urban housing market nearly three decades ago, private home ownership in cities has soared and tens of millions of home-owning Chinese have joined home ownership associations. In his new book, Professor Qiao argues that homeowner associations (HOAs) have fundamentally changed how Chinese urban neighborhoods and cities are governed. Drawing on six years of fieldwork, he finds that local governments have come to rely on homeowners to help govern their own neighborhoods, and homeowners have become accustomed to the democratic ritual of electing HOA leaders. Does the rise of HOAs have any wider significance for China’s political future?

About the speaker:

Shitong Qiao is a professor of law and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke University. He previously taught property and comparative law at the University of Hong Kong and New York University and was a law and public affairs fellow at Princeton University. Professor Qiao employs mixed methods to explore the relationship between political power, law, and private ordering. He has published numerous articles in top Chinese and US law journals and a prize-winning book about law and marketization, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms (Cambridge University Press, 2017).