CAR owners the world over fret about parking, but in China the competition for spaces can be especially fierce. Within just a few years urban China has undergone a transformation. Streets that teemed once with bicycles are clogged now with cars. New housing complexes have sprung up in the suburbs for the fast-growing middle classes. Rows frequently erupt over control of parking spaces within them. These and other local confrontations signify a huge change in the balance of power in Chinese cities.

Until the 1990s the state owned almost all urban housing. Most residents lived close to their state-assigned workplaces. They had no bargaining power. Neighbourhood committees were controlled by Communist Party appointees. If residents had complaints, they usually kept quiet about them.

In recent years, along with the sweeping privatisation of almost all urban housing, a new force has emerged: landlord committees, many of them formed spontaneously by home-owners to protect their new assets.

These committees, often democratically elected with little party interference, have become increasingly powerful in asserting the rights of home-owners against encroachment by the state, and by state-owned and private developers. The fight for control of parking spaces is one of the many modest causes that have brought a change in the urban mentality—beyond a consciousness of limited legal rights, to a growing awareness of the need for a more active “civil society” as a balance against arbitrary officialdom.

To accommodate the new middle classes, whose support is considered vital by Chinese leaders to the maintenance of Communist Party rule, the party has refashioned its ideology. Five years ago it allowed private business owners to join the party. Later this year it plans to revise its charter to fix a new objective, of creating a “harmonious society”—a goal that would appeal to society's underdogs, but would also reassure the middle classes that the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, to which China still lays claim, does not mean attacking property owners.

AFP

China's space race

In March this year, despite vocal opposition by party conservatives, the leadership ensured passage of a new property law in parliament. This was widely hailed as a further salve for landlords. Although much of it merely consolidated existing legislation, it contained important new provisions concerning the rights of property owners in new housing estates, including principles governing the ownership of parking spaces.

The provisions were intended to address the root cause of the parking-space battles, namely, the lack of any clear ownership rights. A developer would usually proceed on the basis that, save for the apartments themselves, any other land and buildings on an estate could be exploited as he saw fit. Home-owners found they had little say in the price of a parking space, and no way to prevent spaces being sold or rented to non-residents. Some estates became jammed with cars parked randomly by residents trying to save money; reserved spaces are often sold at prices equivalent to that of a new car. Private passenger car ownership reached nearly 11.5m last year, more than one-third higher than 2005's level, not counting millions of company and government cars used for private purposes. Many estates were built without factoring in such a surge.

The new law makes clear that parking spaces occupying what the law considers to be land owned collectively by the home-owners, such as roads within estates, are also collectively owned. It obliges developers to give priority to the parking needs of estate residents. It is vaguer on the subject of how home-owners and developers are supposed to cooperate. Some developers, fearing that home-owners will gain a greater say over prices, have rushed to sell off as many spaces as that they can before the law takes effect on October 1st. Disputes continue to simmer.

Party leaders say that a top priority in the development of a “harmonious society” is strengthening democracy and the rule of law. They reject any idea of a multi-party system, but they have begun to talk more about a need for greater “public participation” in policymaking; unusually, an early draft of the property law was made public, and comments on it by private citizens were collected. But developers remain an obstacle. Faren magazine, a legal journal, said this month that out of 3,000 residential estates in Beijing, only 500 had set up landlord committees. It quoted legal experts as saying this was because developers and property management companies often refused to cooperate with them. When it comes to developing democracy, China's new capitalists can be as obstructive as old-style communists.