It is OK to categorize HA’s role as a commercial organization when it struggle with developers for a parking space, for a children’s playground, or just a piece of land, since this is what the developers have promised to fulfill in their advertisements. Homeowners’ movements here could be regarded as the “consumers movement”.

How is it different from the kind of movements like protesting against the meg-lev, or against a high-voltage wire? These issues go beyond the interest of particular neighborhoods. The homeowners are only one of the actors that could be influenced by the projects.

“The state” intervenes the consumers movement less and less today, since the market of the property management and real estate begins to be regularized.

In protests against the meg-lev or high-voltage wire, the homeowners are savvy in “disintegrate” the state. They insist that they are against certain departments of the government, not the whole regime, and they hope to rely on some higher authorities to check the powerful actors so that their rights could be protected. In those issues, it is really hard to explain what the “state intervention” means.

In some way, the logic in both issues is exactly the same. No “collective actions” endangering the stability of “harmonious society”. But in the former case, the state needs to regularize the market. (If you want to take the real estate developers to the court, fine. If you want to dismiss a property management company, fine.) In the latter case… well… where is the boundary?

Roughly outlined the part for HA as a commercial organization. Have to remind myself time and again that this is an ethnography of the state at the grassroots level. Thinking of talking to the theory of the state.

Instead of discussing how homeowners’ need to rely on the state to check the powerful real estate developers in details, I make this as a contrasting background, and analyze how the intervention of the residents’ committee could become a problem.

Decided to say that this intervention is useless, many party secretaries also think it’s useless. Actually they have been intervening less and less. But the empirical materials may not be sufficient for supporting that argument.

Finished the first section of the Empirical Findings, which mainly discusses the ambivalence of state intervention, and where the space for contestation comes from. The good part is tracing the history of how the state power is involved from a perspective of the operation of grassroots institution, though not good enough. Need to refine it later.

Have been thinking about HA as a commercial organization and its relationship with the state for the whole day. Finally decided that I should focus on the ecology at the neighborhood level, while all the other state actors should only be portrayed as the “background”.

“State intervention” may not be a precise generalization. When we say state intervention, we think of government regularizing the market, implementing welfare policies, or something like that, which is not what I want to say.Verdery’s idea on ethnography of state at the grassroots level may be helpful.

Thinking about talking to the literature of state, not civil society.