Cooperation or confrontation? The meaning of property rights for community participation in Shanghai, China

Property rights have played a critical role in shaping residents’ community participation within the realm of neighbourhood governance. More recently, debates around common property rights in gated communities have complicated community participation, presenting diverse driving forces underscoring either an economic logic aimed at securing property values or a political logic for facilitating self-governance. Yet it remains unclear how common property rights are perceived and how rights conscientiousness (re)shapes state–society relationships in the context of intensified state intervention in China. Using large-scale survey data from gated communities in Shanghai and applying multi-level random intercept and multi-level random slope modes, we find that disadvantaged social groups tend to engage in cooperative participation, while residents with strong consciousness of property rights and high economic capability tend to adopt confrontational participation. Furthermore, common property rights are less well known by residents and exhibit a weaker negative association with cooperative participation than private property rights. We argue that while private housing property rights underpin the emergence of a new framework of neighbourhood governance that deviates from traditional top-down approaches, common property rights remain relatively superficial and fragile. This is largely due to the failure to institutionalise common property rights, characterised by ambiguous definitions and legislations, which highlights the local state’s goverancne rationale of prioritising the territorialisation of space over the devolution of power to private governance.