Keynote Speaker: Sun Long (Renmin University of China)
Discussants: Bi Xiangyang, Lei Tao, Ren Bingqiang

More and more citizens become household owners after the reform as the process of commercialization of housing. What follows is more and more knottiness between property and owner. Dr. Sun's research is based on the very background.
Dr. Sun's thesis tries to solve three problems: firstly, how the owner group looks on protection of their rights; secondly, how strong the willingness of protection; lastly, how the mode of homeowners' rights protection influence the mode of public governance and democracy development in china.

The data of this report comes from an investigation done by Beijing Academy of Social Sciences cooperated with Renmin University of China. This investigation adopted two-stage sampling methods which issued 693 questionnaires including 606 valid questionnaires. Investigator chooses districts through quota sampling in the first stage and chooses homeowners throng random sampling in the second stage.

We can get five conclusions with statistical inference as follows: firstly, homeowners that live in the new district are more likely take part in the protection; secondly, there are significant differences among different ages, different careers, different political status and different incomes in the mode of rights protection; thirdly, democracy-prompting preference doesn't have significant influence in the rights protection which means rights protection is low politicalization; fourthly, a main character of homeowners' rights protection in Beijing is not protect their power but right; lastly, middle class is conservative in political but some of them realize their political status is not compatible with their economic status whose willingness of change is urgent. That's why these homeowners take part in politic and promotes governance reform.

November 12th, 2010