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Aided by their relatively privileged social backgrounds and technical and legal knowledge, homeowners have been able to resist these practices in a wide array of ways. They have filed lawsuits and made extensive use of neighborhood websites. Some homeowners have staged hunger strikes for collective ownership of hot water furnaces, used motorcade protests against property management companies overcharging for parking spaces, and refused to pay management fees. Others collectively petition the Ministry of Construction or the local government when the local authorities refuse to register newly formed homeowners’ associations, or stage mass occupations of property management company offices. Leveraging the media has also helped augment the social impact of homeowner activism.

Property rights activism has a tendency to evolve from concrete issues concerning daily community services to more general demands for power and autonomy in running their communities. Activism sharpens homeowners’ collective awareness of the power imbalance that belies the ideals of equality inscribed in the law. This direct confrontation between local state interests and their agents on the one hand, and homeowners organized as neighborhood communities on the other, is producing an awakening among homeowners as “citizens” in relation to the state and not just as owners of material objects.

Whereas labor NGOs are vulnerable both financially and organizationally, the legality of homeowners’ associations is enshrined in the Property Rights Law. They’re also “organic” in the sense that they’re organized and staffed by homeowners themselves and based in their communities, unlike labor NGOs that are organized by professionals, academics, or transnational advocacy groups. In major cities, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Beijing, federations of homeowners’ associations have formed and pledged support for each others’ work. To date, only a minority of commercial housing neighborhoods have elected a homeowners’ association. The Ministry of Construction announced that 18 percent of Beijing’s commercial residential neighborhoods have homeowners’ associations. The legal right to form their own associations isn’t used widely yet, but the trend is unmistakable.

Finally, as in the case of labor rights activism, lawyers play a central role. Many are attracted to the large and lucrative market property rights lawsuits offer. Others are motivated by political idealism and civic consciousness. The rising volumes of property-related civil lawsuits and administrative litigation lawsuits against the Ministry of Construction, which oversees the governance of commercial residential communities, attests to the intensifying conflicts over property rights.

rural land rights activism

In December 2007, tens of thousands of farmers in 150 villages in three provinces (Tianjin, Heilongjiang, and Shaanxi) made a highly unusual political move: they issued three separate statements to the entire country that they were re-taking their land, which had been illegally requisitioned by local officials. It was an act they characterized as their collective right under rural land use rights regulated by the Land Management Law, most recently revised in 1998, and the Rural Land Contracting Law (2003).

One public announcement asserted that “rural collective land should be owned by all the villagers…Officials and their powerful allies abused the authority of the state and the village collective to usurp our rights as land owners. While they turned themselves into landlords, we villagers become their serfs. We have decided to change this form of land ownership…Land is farmers’ life blood and their most important human right.”

Extraordinarily bold moves like these are part of a rising tide of rural struggles over land use rights. Coercive expropriation, withholding of farmer compensations, and lack of job replacement for those whose land has been taken—each now trigger several thousand land-related conflicts in the Chinese countryside every year. These protests often turn violent and see paramilitary troops, armed police, and hired thugs clashing with villagers who resisted illegal land grabs by local officials. Protesters have been shot dead and villagers have taken local officials hostage.

As in the case of labor and property rights activism, the source of land rights protests is the institutional conflict between decentralized accumulation and legalistic legitimation—in other words, between the interest in revenue and growth of the local government and the central government’s concern for maintaining stability and equity through law.

The Land Administration Law and the Law on Rural Land Contracting stipulates that rural land is owned by “village collectives,” while individual households retain land use rights by contracting plots of land from these village collectives, initially for 15, and later 30, years. But these collectives are vulnerable to the decisions of local governments.

Under the pretext of “urban development,” the establishment of high-tech zones and university cities, or simply “public interests,” local governments can ignore the negotiation procedures and compensations stipulated by law and transfer—for a fee—the farmers’ land to state-owned land. The land-use right can then be sold to private developers. Local governments stand to reap a windfall of profits from such land seizures. Indeed, an estimated 34 million to 40 million farmers have lost some of all of their land since 1987.

Like aggrieved workers and homeowners, villagers vent their discontent by petitioning, filing lawsuits, eliciting media attention, and organizing collective protests. Since land grabs often involve local (township and county) governments or the “high-tech zone committee” under them, the Administrative Litigation Law provides the legal basis for farmers to complain about official abuse of power. Again, since the authority of the judiciary is partial and subordinated to the local government, many of these lawsuits have been dismissed by the court.

Blocked by local judiciary, enraged farmers often resort to petitioning Beijing or the provincial government. These long distance “appeals” are increasingly becoming a hide-and-seek game wherein local police and monitors attempt to intercept, arrest, and detain petitioners heading to the national or provincial capital. Mass petitioning and violent confrontations have increased in tandem with farmers’ use of national laws to fight local infractions of land-use laws.

In these legal mobilizations, farmers implicitly or explicitly assert the right to be treated as equal citizens with access to the protection of the law, in addition to insisting on the right to subsistence. Compared to workers, farmers fighting for their land rights command very little organizational or financial support from either international associations or the domestic NGO sector. Compared to homeowners in cities, farmers are also more financially constrained and have less access to professional legal knowledge and services.

An intriguing development in this arena that could have repercussions in others in coming years is the rise of barefoot lawyers. The Chinese legal system allows citizens the right to enlist the legal representation of other ordinary citizens, so long as no fee is charged. These volunteer lawyers are self-taught legal workers motivated by a sense of justice, righteousness, and local heroism to protect fellow villagers and farmers against all kinds of local official abuses.

beyond beijing

The fact that the fights over everyday rights described here have escaped international headlines is perhaps not surprising given media conventions and conventional biases and assumptions about China and the Olympic Games themselves. But it’s nonetheless disappointing. A real opportunity lost.

This is not only because an understanding of rights activism affords such a rich perspective on Chinese culture and society and all the forces driving the near-total transformation of the most populace nation in the world. It’s also because of the tensions between economic growth and social stability, between authoritarian rule and a more responsive state and involved citizenry; the problematic relationships between state and local government; and the more grounded and specific cultural conceptions of rights and the law itself. And perhaps most importantly, it’s because these are the struggles that will linger and define China long after the spectators and the spectacle of the Olympic Games depart.

recommended resources

Neil J. Diamant, Stanley Lubman, and Kevin J. O’Brien, eds. Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford University Press, 2005). This reviews a range of legal rights struggles in China.

Ching Kwan Lee. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). The author’s work explores the politics of labor rights involving migrant workers and state sector workers.

Elizabeth J. Perry. “The Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao and Now,” Perspectives on Politics (2008) 6(1): 37-50. The author argues that there are fundamental differences between Chinese and American conceptions of rights.

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