Neighborhood Governance during the Shanghai Lockdown

This event was recorded on Wednesday, May 4, 2022

About the Event

Building on his research into neighborhood governance in urban China, Professor Shitong Qiao will discuss grassroots governance during the Shanghai COVID-19 lockdown, including the emergence of spontaneous cooperation among residents at the neighborhood level and the regulation and self-regulation of resident groups. Neighborhood cooperation arises where the state largely fails. It both facilitates the implementation of lockdown policies and provides services essential to the survival of Shanghai residents during such a lockdown. He will be joined by Kenney Zhu, a leader of the food supply team in his Shanghai neighborhood, who will share his experiences. With Roderick M. Hills, professor of law at NYU School of Law, as moderator.

About the speaker

Shitong Qiao is a law professor and the Ken Young-Gak Yun and Jinah Park Yun Research Scholar at Duke Law School. He was a tenured professor at the University of Hong Kong, a Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) fellow at Princeton University, and the inaugural Jerome A. Cohen Visiting Professor of Law at NYU. He also taught in Shenzhen (Peking University School of Transnational Law) and Shanghai (NYU Shanghai). Professor Qiao is an expert on property and urban law with a focus on comparative law and China. His first monograph, Chinese Small Property: The Co-Evolution of Law and Social Norms, explores the relationship between law and market transition, and has won multiple prizes in the US and Asia. He is working on his second monograph, The Authoritarian Commons, which explores the relationship between law and social transformation. Professor Qiao has also published a number of journal articles in top American and Chinese law journals. Professor Qiao graduated from Wuhan (LL.B.), Peking (MPhil), and Yale (LL.M., J.S.D.). Professor Qiao has served as an expert (witness) on the Chinese property regime in China, Canada, and the US.