Neighborhood activism: The emergence of a new homeowner class in urban China?

With the progress of homeowners in China, contentious actions launched by homeowners are also on the increase. Nearly all of such collective action, the majority of which were organized by their homeowner associations, displays a strong desire in protecting their property rights. Conventional class analysis perceives homeownership as a conservative factor in homeowners’ political movement but other empirical studies instead show homeowners’ active involvement in community activities. There is an apparent appeal for the concept of housing class in explaining homeowners’ positivity in local affairs that homeowners have a common material interest (property ownership), social organisation (homeowner associations), interaction with the state and capitalist agents, as well as the arena for action in forming a new class. Hence, to what extent homeownership offers basis for class formation and determine neighborhood activism is at best unclear. By exploring the neighborhood actions in urban China, this paper attempts to further the understanding of homeowners’ involvement in neighborhood activism by revealing the social and political dimensions of neighborhood activism besides the apparent pecuniary interest and evaluate the thesis of housing class from a class analytic perspective. With a portrayal of nuanced pictures of grass-root movement, the paper intends to enrich our understanding of homeowners’ organization and mobilization, and its impact on the development of civic society in China