Institutional Restrictions: Why can’t the Property Owners’ Committee be Established?: An Analysis of the Practice Process of Legal Texts

Abstract

Why cannot property owners’ committees be established? This study answers this question from the perspective of legal practice process, which is different from previous discussions about the owner’s actions. Previous studies regard the law as a weapon and tool for owners to safeguard their rights, while this study focuses on the legal texts and regards the legal system as the key variable of the establishment of the property owners’ committees. We adopt field observation and in-depth interviews to analyze the establishment process of Guangzhou property owners’ committees in Guangzhou in the past 20 years. It is found that the legal system is often transformed into a governance tool, which is specifically characterized as the “anti-mobilization ability” of the system. In this case, local governments intervene in the development of legal texts by means of self-empowerment, raising the bar, and intentional delay, to embed administrative objectives and facilitate the convenience of administrative control and regulation, which partly results in the difficulty to establish owner’s committees.