The glitzy community in Beijing's Chaoyang district first welcomed residents in 2007. However, vexed by poor property management, many residents demanded the management company get better or leave, and the only way to make sure this would happen was to elect a homeowners committee.
After lots of paperwork and preparations, elections were held in late March this year and 1,000 residents cast their votes. However, all of the ballot boxes stuffed with votes were seized by the neighborhood committee, China's lowest-level government organ usually in charge of several hundred urban households.
The local Party chief, who was appointed head of the working group in charge of preparing for the election, announced that a superior government had decided to lock up the ballots indefinitely due to "disordered preparation for the voting," without further explanation.
Homeowner representatives argue it is unacceptable that the neighborhood committee has cut their democratic experiment short, believing that their right to represent their own interests is legally guaranteed.
The dispute at Swan Bay community is a typical faceoff between committee organizers and local governments.
The Real Right Law and subsequent municipal decrees request that the local government only "assist," "guide," and "supervise" the establishment and activities of the homeowners committee.
Fu Yingtao, one of the Swan Bay homeowner representatives, said the two parties interpret the law differently. Homeowners tend to believe they should be free to exercise self-governance and the government should support them rather than dictate every bit of the process. But Chen says that in his experience, it's hard for governmental organs not to interfere.
Though Chen admits that governments have been changing their attitude overall and the legal environment for these disputes has improved in the past couple of years.
It's easier for homeowner committees to get support from the authorities when filing a lawsuit against property management companies, including acquiring official documents concerning the residential community.
Community corruption
Corruption is a key factor that obstructs the establishment of homeowner committees. Critics say the marketization of property in the past three decades has moved faster than China's legal construction, creating room for malpractice in the unregulated sector.
Li Haibo, a resident of Dongba Jiayuan, a community in Beijing's Chaoyang district, has been petitioning various government departments because he claims he was illegally detained by the police while collecting signatures from his neighbors to help set up a homeowners committee early this year.
He wanted to formally establish a committee and acquire legal status to get the local government to hand over documents about his community. He believes that a homeowners committee, representing all the residents of the compound, would find it easier to get the information than an individual acting alone.
Li wanted to use the official documents to prove the developer illegally changed its construction plan for the community to make apartments larger so they could make more money.
Li claims that he couldn't get his property certificate - which he will need if he ever wants to sell his home - from the district government as they claimed they had never approved the construction of his home, due to the changes that were made to the plan.
His efforts were in vain as he was pushed around by the development company and the Dongba township government, which is the biggest stakeholder in the company.
Li told the Global Times that he suspects the township government knew about the developer's illegal actions, and that if the homeowners committee was set up and acquires the related construction records, their malpractice will be revealed. This couldn't be verified by the Dongba government.
Li's claims are not fanciful as there have been many cases in which developers have changed construction plans illegally. The Beijing News reported in 2013 that deputy mayor Chen Gang told a meeting that Beijing has 1.4 million square meters of illegal construction.
Chen said similar instances of malpractice by local governments in real estate development are not uncommon. Once homeowner committees are widely established, these crimes will be made public.
"It will be like Pandora's Box was opened," he said.
