Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of homeowners’ organizational coalition in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Based on the analyses of the data from documents, firsthand interviews and Internet networks, homeowners’ organizational coalition in Shanghai is found to be weaker than that in Guangzhou. This paper proposes an analytical framework, which integrates the insights from social movement coalition studies and urban governance studies, to explain the differences in the homeowners’ crossneighborhood coalition in the two cities. Compared with Gangzhou, the residential governance system in Shanghai is relatively advanced and the probability for the homeowners to experience common threats and severe right infringement is relatively low; hence, less likely for the homeowners in different residential communities to collaborate. In addition, the highly developed grassroots governance structure in Shanghai also has the capacity to preempt the radicalization of conflicts and prevent them from becoming citywide public issues. Finally, lack of allies within the institutional system is also a contributory factor to the homeowners’ localized collective action at the neighborhood level in Shanghai. Given the responsive nature of contention at the city level in China and the Chinese social management system’s dual functions of social control and interest representation, future urbancontention studies should pay attention to the institutional roots of contenders’ claims and institutional constraints on collective contention as well as state’s multifaceted roles. On the one hand, the state can, to some extent, preempt the emergence of largescale collective actions through institutional design. On the other hand, availability of intuitional allies plays an important role in facilitating the formation of lateral coalition.

Key words: organizational coalition, governance structure, political opportunity (threat), contention