In Search of Paradise

Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis

Li Zhang

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801458194
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China.

Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves. In Search of Paradise is a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era.

New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang's account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world.

1

Farewell to Welfare Housing

Housing is no longer a welfare item; it is now a commodity!

A widespread government slogan

The rapid privatization and commercialization since the early 1990s has led to the disintegration of the socialist “urban public goods regime” (Solinger 1995) and the formation of a hybrid urban economic and distribution system. A new urban geography of class is emerging with a heightened popular consciousness toward private property ownership. The prerevolutionary time has often become a point of reference for people to talk about current changes. A popular rhyme in the reform era is, “Forty years of suffering no end; back where we started now we must bend.”1 What it suggests is not that China is simply returning to a prerevolutionary social structure and political system. But in the eyes of many ordinary Chinese, the emerging form of social and economic life no doubt resembles many elements of the old days. Private home ownership and commercialization of urban land are just two of the most palpable changes that indicate the end of the socialist mode of city life.

In this chapter I trace this historical transformation with a particular focus on housing and land use in order to contextualize my ethnographic study. By contrasting the high socialist period with the prerevolutionary time (prior to 1949) and the post-Mao reform years (1978–present), I seek to highlight both disruption and continuity in the system of housing and people’s everyday experiences of it. Therefore, this chapter is mainly a macro-level historical recount of these changes. Toward the end of this chapter, I will also bring our attention to how the master city plan for Kunming, which is premised on commercial developments and a modernizing ethos, gives rise to a new urban geography quite different from that of the prerevolutionary and socialist times.

Throughout this historical account, I seek to conceptualize the changes by suggesting that the commercialization of land use and the privatization of housing is a core strategy of post-Mao developmentalism that relies on the real estate industry as a vital growth engine. This mega-development, I argue, is built on what I call “late and postsocialist primitive accumulation,” involving two simultaneous processes—the dispossession of state and public assets and the massive displacement of disenfranchised urban and rural residents.2 As David Harvey has observed, “the turn towards state-orchestrated capitalism in China has entailed wave after wave of primitive accumulation,” causing “a great deal of localized social distress and episodes of fierce, sometimes even violent, class struggle in areas desolated by this process” (2003, 153–54). The key to this primitive accumulation is the release into private hands of two sets of assets previously monopolized by the state—urban land and enterprises—at very low or virtually no cost. In other words, what makes the rapid accumulation possible is the chipping away of vast state resources by private entities, accompanied by the massive forced relocation of ordinary citizens to make space for real estate development. As a result of this grand reallocation of capital and resources, a glaring socioeconomic disparity is emerging. Moreover, the absence of property rights law before 2003 and a rather murky field of legal regulation have provided the necessary conditions for primitive accumulation in China. Although the state is making an increased effort to formalize and regulate the emerging land and real estate markets, local practices constantly ignore, evade, or derail government rulings to maximize capital accumulation.

The Rise of Welfare Housing

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Maoist party-state strove to establish a new egalitarian society by eliminating all forms of private property ownership through nationalization (guoyou hua) of land, economic production, education, health care, housing, and other social services (see Meisner 1986; Whyte and Parish 1984). This approach was clearly influenced by Marx’s declaration in The Communist Manifesto that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property” (cited in Tucker 1978, 484). Private ownership (siyou) was thus largely denounced as the evil cause of capitalism. In the cities, the socialist state became the sole legitimate owner of all land and assumed the primary responsibility for the welfare of its citizens through the newly established “urban public goods regime” that excluded rural residents outright (Solinger 1995; Zhang 2002). At the heart of this welfare regime was state ownership of land, public ownership of property, and state distribution of resources to official urban hukou (household registration) holders.3 This regime became the pillar of a new urban socioeconomic order and the basis of the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Chinese term fuli (equivalent to “welfare”) refers to a range of material benefits and free services that come with one’s legal classification as an urban citizen and with employee status. Fuli fang, public housing distributed and managed by one’s work unit, was perhaps the most important welfare benefit up to the late 1990s. Urban hukou holders were entitled not only to employment and public housing but also to low-cost services and goods heavily subsidized by the state. There was a strong sense of entitlement shared by urbanites who took state and danwei provision for granted. Welfare in socialist urban China, formed on the basis of collectivism and a state-planned economy, thus took on different meanings than it does in the West, where the concept is largely linked with social democracy and Keynesianism.

Kunming was no exception to these dramatic changes but took its own course. Unlike other major Chinese cities, Kunming was “liberated” peacefully and relatively late, in December 1949, when the provincial president, Lu Han, led an uprising and established a new Communist municipal government. When the new governing team led by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) entered Kunming, it took control over all major private finance, commerce, manufacturing, and retail companies in the province by nationalizing them into eight large state-owned enterprises. The danwei system was also established throughout the city. Prior to 1950, Kunming had been a hub linking China to Southeast Asia even though ground and air transportation to the inland was very limited. After 1950, it became rather isolated from the outside world as the central state decided to shut down many of these trade channels for national security reasons. A railway connecting Kunming to other parts of China was created in 1966 and slightly improved the situation.

For those who grew up under Mao’s regime, public ownership was the norm and public housing was the predominant form. Concepts such as “private property,” “privacy,” and the “real estate market” appeared as not only alien but also as politically dangerous. Yet, for the older generation who had lived through the prerevolutionary period, during which private homeownership and the rental market were part of everyday life, the subsequent changes under socialism were dramatic. Some have compared the impact of the socialist housing reform on urban citizens to that of land reform on peasants in the countryside. Before 1950, most urban housing was privately owned and government involvement in this domain was limited.4 Private housing was largely concentrated in the hands of a small group of landlords with large landholdings, however, leaving ordinary working-class families in poor, overcrowded conditions on the periphery of the cities (see Zhang 1998, 24–25).

In Kunming, there existed a clear spatialization of class. Merchants, entrepreneurs, local officials, military officers, and cultural elites owned sizable courtyard houses in the city core, where they were attended by their own private servants and protected by guards. Many of them also owned additional estates. Merchant families located in prime commercial districts often turned part of their house (the section facing the street) into a shop or shops (see Zhang 2006). Middle and lower-middle-income families generally had small courtyard houses; some were able to rent out a couple of rooms for extra income. My interviewees born in the 1920s and 1930s still had clear memories of the homes owned by their families. They could give me a detailed description of the houses and locate their family property on the city map even if many of these old houses had been demolished as a result of recent urban renewal. Working-class families, college students, and migrants usually rented rooms by using personal networks or real estate brokers. The private rental market was so lively and lucrative that the brokers had become a special class known as fang yazi (“housing ducks”) who made a comfortable living on brokerage fees. The majority of the underclass lived in crowded, self-constructed shacks or mud houses just outside of the old city walls. A retired, eighty-year-old teacher described to me what these places were like:

I was a college student and a member of the CCP’s democratic youth league. So I was asked to visit the poorest in the city in order to spread the news from the party and mobilize the masses. My comrades and I went to the poorest areas or what we called “ghettos” near the Little West Gate, which separated the city from the outside. Along the old city walls, we saw huts, shacks, or simple mud houses put up by those struggling on the edge of society, including rickshaw pullers, newspaper sellers, street peddlers, fortune tellers, migrant workers, and so on. The conditions were miserable.

In the early 1950s, the CCP strove to nationalize the economy and eliminate private home ownership. Under the new policies, privately owned residential structures in Kunming were confiscated by the municipal housing bureau, which became the de facto landlord. Families that had owned their houses were allowed to retain only a small part of the unit as their own residence. The rest of the house was divided into several parts and assigned to other families in need of housing. These families were required to pay a very small fee to the city housing bureau. In some cases, the entire house was confiscated by the city government and the original owner’s family was forced out completely. Although the great majority of private property was transformed into public housing, there remained a small percentage of private housing (si fang) in Kunming. Up to the late 1950s, people were still able to rent rooms informally by word of mouth, but the private “housing ducks” had largely vanished.

Kunming residents who had lost their family property during nationalization remembered their house and the takeover of their property clearly. For decades they had lived in fear generated by the often violent event. One of them, Song Ping, was a taxi driver in his fifties when I interviewed in 2006. His grandparents were considered capitalists because they owned factories and several houses in Kunming. During the nationalization in the early 1950s, most of their family properties were confiscated by the city government, but they were allowed to retain several rooms to live in. During the Cultural Revolution, some of these rooms were taken over by the workers and peasants who had seized political power. “I was still a child at that time, but I was already living in fear all the time,” said Song Ping. “Because my family’s class background was not good, my grand parents were subject to public humiliation while our house was divided and occupied by strangers. I have since then lived in the shadow of insecurity. My heart would tremble whenever I heard the beating of drums, dreading that another attack on my family was approaching.” Even today he still does not like the sound of a gong and drum because it reminds him of that painful experience so deeply ingrained in his memory. I asked how he and his family felt when other people moved into their house. “Bitter, of course. But we dared not say anything; it was a state policy. Under the circumstances, we felt lucky just to stay alive,” he replied.

It is not hard to imagine why tension grew between the original owner’s family and incoming families sent by the city. The former tended to see the latter as invaders taking over their property but could not openly express their resentment. The original owners largely belonged to the relatively privileged, propertied class. But the new revolutionary order had denounced this class and displaced it to the bottom of the socialist class hierarchy. The incoming families were mostly poorer, working-class members who had no place of their own. They saw the original owners as societal parasites who had exploited others under the old system. Thus, they felt morally superior to the original owners and as deserving to use these houses. The tight living conditions also gave rise to conflicts between families. The now divided houses were originally built for single family use with one well in the center of the courtyard. When four to eight families came to live together, they had to share the limited common space and the well for water. Some families set up a small cooking area outside their room to maximize the use of space. If one family took up more space than others, made too much noise, occupied the well too often, or left garbage in the walkway, disputes and resentment would occur. Some families were placed in buildings originally designed as offices, schools, and for other functions. Sharing space and facilities in this situation also caused frequent conflicts (see Whyte and Parish 1986, 81).

Meanwhile, most Kunming residents were gradually brought into a new socialist mode of work and life, known as the danwei system, which combined workplace, residence, leisure, and basic community services. The state channeled large amounts of funds directly to the state-owned work units that were responsible for building housing compounds for their own employees. Before the post-Mao housing reform, 80–90 percent of urban residents nationwide lived in such danwei-based housing (Wang and Murie 1999a; Zhang 1998). In this system, access to housing was essentially tied to one’s employment status, and family life became deeply intertwined with work as people living in the same housing compound belonged to the same work unit. The danwei resembles the basic building block of the Soviet city known as the mikroraion (“microregion or district”), initiated by the Nikita Khrushchev regime in the late 1950s. A typical mikroraion “comprised a neighborhood unit of living spaces in the form of blocks of flats, along with associated services, for perhaps 5,000 to 15,000 people. Pedestrian precincts linked restaurants, nurseries, kindergartens, club rooms, libraries and sports facilities, as well as educational, health, retail and cultural services” (D. Smith 1996, 75). The main difference between the two is that the danwei is typically walled and gated and all the services are provided by the work unit.

There was a high degree of uniformity in the spatial design of the danwei and its housing across Chinese cities. In his intriguing analysis of the genealogy of the danwei system, David Bray (2005) provides a detailed account of the distinct spatial form, architectural design, and rationale of the newly invented, socialist housing. He shows that danwei housing, which featured uniform, blocky, multistory buildings organized into gated residential compounds, was heavily influenced by Soviet urban planning (cf. Bater 1980 and Buchli 1999). According to Bray, two basic styles were borrowed from the Soviets: dormitory rooms with shared toilet, washing, and cooking facilities; and apartments with their own basic facilities that shared a hallway and main entrance. The two main reasons for adopting these particular housing forms were that they could be easily mass produced at a low cost and they served as a concrete spatial realization of the socialist principle of equality. The ultimate goal was to create a collective form of social life and egalitarian social relationships through spatial reorganization, while maximizing the use of space and minimizing construction costs. This type of housing was widely adopted by Kunming’s work units, but because of the relatively lower population density in this city compared with Beijing and Shanghai, some one-story flats also were allowed.

The public housing system was firmly in place for about forty years, but it had many serious problems. First, due to insufficient state investment and rapidly increasing population pressure, there was a severe housing shortage and overcrowding throughout Chinese cities. The average living space per capita in urban China was 3.1 square meters in 1960, and then slowly increased to 3.6 meters in 1978 and 5.2 meters in 1985.5 In Kunming, it was common for a family of five members to live in a small apartment of less than twenty square meters, sharing a single kitchen and bathroom with several other families. The situation in larger metropolitan areas such as Shanghai and Beijing was even worse and it was not uncommon for a family of three generations to live in one room. A piece of cloth was often used to separate sleeping areas among family members for privacy. In the mid-1980s, when I attended Peking University, a married junior professor with a child was normally assigned to one small room in a dormitory-style building and two single faculty members shared a room. Cooking was done with a small, movable gas stove in the dark, narrow hallway. Social friction and disputes between and within families frequently occurred as people tried to maximize their use of space by extending into what was considered public domain, such as the hallway and the shared water room.

Second, extremely low rent and heavy reliance on state subsidies resulted in poor housing maintenance and s...

Table of contents

• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Farewell to Welfare Housing
• 2. Unlocking the Real Estate Machine
• 3. Emerging Landscapes of Living
• 4. Spatializing Class
• 5. Accumulation by Displacement
• 6. Recasting Self-Worth
• 7. Privatizing Community Governing and Its Limits
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References