Home Ownership and Political Participation in Urban China

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of private home ownership on the tendency to engage in neighborhood-level politics among urban Chinese citizens. We focus on voting in neighborhood Residents' Committee elections as well as local legislative elections, highlighting the role of the neighborhood type on voting. our analysis of the 2005 China general Social Survey data reveals that homeowners are more likely than nonowners to vote in both elections, lending support to a conservatizing effect of private home ownership. However, this effect seems to exist only in neighborhoods consisting mainly of commercial housing units as opposed to previously state-owned housing. The implications of these findings for China's political future are discussed.

Mobilized to Take a Vanguard Role: Communist Party Members’ Participation in the Community Building Campaign

“…The coefficients of other variables of interest in this subsample analysis are somewhat elusive, so we simply present the results themselves and note that because of the dwindled sample sizes, they should be interpreted with caution. A reference is Li's(2009) article, it finds that in the subsample of old residential neighborhoods (consisting of un-redeveloped old neighborhoods and danwei compounds), Party members are active participants in RC voting. But as model 2 and model 4 in Table 4 report, in these two types of 'old residential neighborhoods', Party membership's effects on RC voting are not statistically significant, and signs of coefficients are positive for one, negative for the other.…”

“…Some of those studies have provided the overall pictures at the national level, with attention directed to the effects of residents' home-ownership, hukou, and social capital on voting at the community level(J. Li and Wang 2012;J. Li 2009;Z.…”

Cross-City Variations in Housing Outcomes in Postreform China

“…Three systems of housing provision were established-commodity housing for sale at market rates, subsidized affordable housing (jingji shiyong fang) targeted at 70 percent of low-and middle-income households, and public rental housing for the urban poor (Wang and Murie 2011). The rearrangement of housing property rights has resulted in a rapid increase in the numbers of homeowners (Li and Yi 2007;Li and Wang 2012).…”

Redrawing the Boundaries

“…ize the urban housing sector was implemented, and the direct allocation of new housing units by danwei was scrapped in 1998 (Li and Wang 2012); the delivery of other fringe benefits and services increasingly took the form of lump-sum cash payments as the state further lifted its salary control on work units (Yang and Zhou 1999); and social security (pension and medical care) has now been successfully unified at the provincial level with coverage being gradually extended to the private sector. Moreover, as the Chinese government had increasingly tolerated layoffs and unemployment, many workers were forced to leave the public sector involuntarily and job mobility rates increased faster than before (Li 2013).…”