To Remove Walls or Not: Analysis Into the Dilemma of Chinese “Block System Policy”

Property right protection has gradually become a major concern for the emerging and expanding group of homeowners in China, which entails an institutional change regarding community governance. The aim of the paper is to identify the reasons why the Block System Policy initiative in China has caused a social resentment and had to be suspended under considerable social pressure. Employing qualitative grounded theory research method, including an analysis framework of the torque equation from a social physics perspective, as a method of analysis, this study analyses the contrasting arguments around whether or not the community walls should be torn down in China, to expound the tension between the different agents’ preferences on BSP initiative, and to shed light on the inherent logic of the debated policy. The key variables used to predict the trend of BSP have been supposed to be the preference intensity and the effective multitude of the organized stakeholders, whose multiplied products will count for the general balance of the policy direction. Additionally, by reviewing Chinese historical idiosyncrasy for walls, this paper particularly stresses the importance of the homeowners’ intensity of preference to protect their property rights and resources, which substantially shaped the destiny of the policy.