Commodification of housing, the most contentious issue area in urban China, signifies two pivotal transitions: the dismantling of a state-sponsored welfare state and the creation of property rights in a socialist country. New stakeholders---urban middle-class homeowners, the local state, and housing entrepreneurs---compete over new sources of revenue and contend the establishment of property rights. Middle-class homeowners vigorously articulate their interests, increasingly independent of the state. With decentralization, housing commodification also tests the capacity of the local state, as business entrepreneur and as social engineer. In addition to attempting to maximize local revenue from the thriving housing market, the local state must penetrate grassroots society to control the local population.;My dissertation investigates growing homeowner activism and explains how institutional arrangements for local governance and the relationship between the local state and housing entrepreneurs alternately constrain or enable interest articulation. Broadly, it is about how commodified housing property rights are institutionalized in urban China. My empirical work focuses on two Chinese megacities: Beijing and Shanghai. Homeowner activism in Shanghai is not as broadly participatory, as horizontally linked, or as mobilized as in Beijing. To explain why, I draw on: visits to neighborhood sites, over 80 in-depth interviews, an original representative telephone survey of over 500 homeowners, and published Chinese statistical data.;I find that Shanghai has been more successful in refurbishing and establishing grassroots governance institutions to penetrate a marketized local society. Decentralization within the city has enabled it to retain sufficient resources and personnel for local state engagement with the grassroots local society. Shanghai's stronger administrative capacity to co-opt emerging homeowner organizations accounts for the less vibrant homeowner activism in the city. In contrast, Beijing faces dual pressures in establishing a property rights regime---from ordinary citizens below and the central government above. Because of its status as the political capital, the city is trapped in its efforts to redirect existing institutional arrangements to serve a marketized society. Paradoxically, constraints on the Beijing city government offer greater political space for citizen interest articulation.
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