Rights protection actions and political participation in China : the case of homeowners in Beijing

This thesis analyzes the organization-based resistance of homeowners in Beijing. Pioneering studies on resistance and protest in China have found that aggrieved social groups are not used to resorting to organization-based resistance to address their issues. This study will introduce organization-based participation of urban homeowner groups. To protect their property rights, homeowners use legal opportunities to set up homeowners’ committees to facilitate their actions. To protect their property rights and curb the intervention from local governments, some organized homeowners can activate the election of residents’ committees—institutions that have been supported and controlled by local governments for a long time. Highly familiar with the workings of the laws, homeowner activists and their organizations even try their best to influence policy-making processes. This study argues that, through institutionalized channels, aggrieved social groups can gather their forces by organization building and can enjoy a relatively loosely controlled space to organize themselves. As a result, social groups can have the ability to mobilize participants and other resources to make some institutionalized channels work. This study adopts a qualitative research method in the analysis. Empirical materials used in the study were collected by the author through fieldwork. In addition, I also collected data from the Internet, especially from the Internet forums of homeowners. At the same time, I have kept contact with some main homeowner activists by email, MSN messenger, and Tencent QQ. In the analysis, I discuss the general situation in 19 community cases, and several cases are discussed in detail to show concrete underlying mechanisms