The Pearl River Delta has witnessed the dramatic proliferation of commodity housing enclaves with gating spatial form in the metropolitan suburban area since 1990,which could be regarded as the globalized and neo-liberal landscape in contemporary urban and geographic discourse.Conversely,this paper examines this process in local social and political context,through which we could regard the commodity housing enclaves as the state projects rather than absolutely independent enclave,coupled with regulatory practices and public impact upon these private territories.Based on macro-level analysis,this paper argues that although the commodity housing enclaves are declared to be the neoliberal,market-oriented restructuring projects superficially,they could be adopted as the strategic political-economic space responding the crisis of national accumulation regime and regulatory framework substantially.This paper illuminates the historic path of communities ranging from work unit compounds to commodity housing enclaves throughout the socialist China,reflecting the processes of destruction,vacancy and reconstruction of state hegemony in local geographical scale.Accordingly,reproduction of built environment is employed as one of the resorts in crisis management at the process of rescaling of state,through which the state could establish the base of sustainable capitalist growth,strong local attachment,effective public management and public provision.At a micro-level analysis,the commodity housing enclaves are hardly demonstrated as insulated private territories through the approach of local events tracking,rather,the proliferation of private spatial territories involves a paradox increase in public intervention.Perceived to be the self-contained communities,the superior states normally are considered to be the mostly effective and legitimate channel to cope with the contradiction happened inside the communities.Furthermore,in these years the states tend to reinforce the power of space governance,which actually could penetrate the substantial boundaries of commodity housing enclaves.Hence the inhabitants who pursue the private space and resource eventually confronted with the destiny of deprivation and restriction from the state.Consequently,even though community development in China is entangled with the normative trend such as public retreat and self organization,we could identify a distinctive development pathway of gated communities which is different from its counterparts in US and Latin America.While the global discourses of globalization and neo-liberalism seem increasingly applicable in China,we intend to present a unique top-down state-oriented pathway of commodity housing enclaves in local context.