Speaker: Qiao Shitong, Professor of Law and Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar, Duke University

Based on six-year fieldwork across China including over 200 in-depth interviews, this book provides an ethnographic account of how hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners practice democracy in and beyond their condominium complexes. Using interviews, survey data, and a comprehensive examination of laws, policies and judicial decisions, this book also examines how the party-state in China responds to the risks and benefits brought by neighborhood democratization. Moreover, this book provides a framework to analyze different approaches to the authoritarian dilemma facing neighborhood democratization which may increase the regime’s legitimacy and expose it to the challenge of independent organizations at the same time. Lastly, this book identifies conditions under which neighborhood democratization can succeed.

Shitong Qiao is Professor of Law and Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke University. He also taught property and comparative law at the University of Hong Kong and New York University and was 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 the 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).

We would like to thank the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning, and the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies for supporting this event.  Please subscribe to our mailing list if you’d like to receive e-mail notifications: http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/urbanchinaseminar.

Zoom Meeting Link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97147498753