China's Housing Middle Class

Changing Urban Life in Gated Communities

Beibei Tang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138069855
• eBook ISBN: 9781351630023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Home ownership plays a significant role in locating the middle class in most western societies, associated with market, consumerism, democracy and "people like us", the significant features of the middle class for any society. In China, private home ownership was not the norm from 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took power, until the 1990s. In the past three decades, however, there has been a fast growing housing consumption and private homeowners have become the most significantly changing aspect of Chinese urban life. In particular, the rise of gated communities has become a predominant feature of the urban landscape. Similar to their western counterparts, the gated communities in China exemplify "high status" symbols with enclosed and restricted residential areas, exclusive community parks and recreational facilities, and professional management and security services. But different from western societies where gated communities usually represent luxurious lifestyles only limited to a small group of people, in urban China gated communities have become one major form of supply in the housing market and one of the most popular and desirable choices for homebuyers. Private home ownership and residency in gated communities, altogether characterize the most significant aspect of comfort living and distinct lifestyles of China's new middle classes who have successfully got ahead in the socialist market economy.

This book examines the formation of "China's housing middle class". It develops a theoretical argument about, and provides empirical evidence of the heterogeneity of China's new middle class, which underlines the relations between the state, market and life chances under a socialist market economy. As such it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Chinese society, sociology and politics.

1 Prestige and privileges

Three types of gated community and two groups of housing middle class

It is a worldwide phenomenon that a massive upsurge of fortified and enclave developments has become an increasingly common feature of contemporary suburban building patterns (Blakely and Snyder 1997; Blakely 1999). Gated communities are privatized public areas, which are normally surrounded by fences and walls, with “controlled entrances that are intended to prevent penetration by non-residents” (Blakely and Snyder, 1997, p. 2). In the US, Latin America, South Africa and Europe, it is now well documented that life behind gates has been seen as a pursuit of status, privacy, and security, as well as giving the investment potential of gated dwellings. In addition to the spatial segregation, another common feature is the professional property management and services in the communities, through which gated-community residency is intertwined with “a legal framework which allows the extraction of monies to help pay for maintenance of common-buildings, common services, such as rubbish collection, and other revenue costs such as paying staff to clean or secure the neighborhood” (Atkinson and Blandy 2005, p. 177).

As part of the global phenomenon, gated communities in China share those sociospatial features with their western counterparts. In particular, in today’s China the restricted physical settings of the residential areas and professional services provided to the residents characterize the gated community as an exclusive site for representing a prestigious lifestyle and emerging middle-class culture. More specifically, a group of scholars has examined the spatial formation of the middle class in Chinese gated communities, and everyday situated practices in gated communities, to reveal the mechanism of the so-called “spatialization of class” (Zhang 2010), where the production of commodity housing, gated communities, and private living provides the physical and social ground for middle-class identities to be cultivated, staged, and contested (Pow 2009; Zhang 2010).

In spite of being part of the global trend, gated-community residency in China is significantly different from its western counterpart. Unlike many western countries where gated communities typically appeal to a relatively small, affluent elite (Webster et al. 2002), gated communities in urban China accommodate not only wealthy residents such as private entrepreneurs, but also a large number of residents with modest salary income, such as public servants and employees from public institutions. Also, for this group of residents, the acquisition of gated housing is not driven by consumption as is commonly seen elsewhere. Instead, their gated-community residency is the result of complex housing reform that changed the housing contract in urban China.

Moreover, since the housing reform, although socialist institutions no longer directly provide housing to their employees, they continue to influence housing provision through their engagement in the housing market. As shown in this chapter and Chapter 2, resource-rich work units still manage to provide privileged access to gated-community residency to their employees. In turn, services in gated communities in China are not entirely carried out by professional management companies as in many other countries. Some resource-rich work units are heavily involved in managing community services in gated communities developed for their employees. Therefore, gated communities in China accommodate more than the common contractual relations between the housing market and individual consumers observed elsewhere, and accommodate multifaceted relations between the market, the socialist institutions, and individual consumers.

Those relations have resulted in diversities among Chinese gated communities and their residents, rather than the commonly acknowledged homogeneity and commonality of interests among residents in western societies (Atkinson and Blandy 2005, 2006). Scholars suggest that gated communities in those societies generally represent a search for community with residents seeking contact with like-minded people who socially mirror their own aspirations. But this “communitarian ideology” in the context of urban China is based more on residents’ privileged access to resources than their pursuit of “like-minded people.” As this chapter illustrates, middle-class gated communities in China actually present much diversity instead of a unified set of urban forms, which include different types of ownership and different forms of property management. Those variations have largely resulted from the transformation of reward-distribution mechanisms from the planned economy to the market economy, in particular the changing housing contract between urban employees and the socialist state.

Housing reform and changing housing contracts in urban China

From the 1980s, housing reform in terms of housing privatization and housing commercialization gradually ended the history of China’s urban public-housing provision. The housing reform was carried out with two major themes—housing commodification and privatization—by selling work-unit housing to their employees and establishing a housing market for the so-called “commodity housing” (shangpin fang). As summarized by Wang and Murie (1996, 1999), different levels of government carried out the housing reform through three major steps. During its first stage (1979–1985), housing reform experiments were carried out in a few selected cities, with pilot tests of commercialization of urban housing. The pilot tests and the experiments included the sale of new housing to urban residents at construction cost (1979–1981); and offering opportunities for individual buyers to pay one-third of the total cost of the house, with subsidies from the employer and the city government to pay the rest (1982–1985). From 1983, the State Council moved further to guarantee protections over private-property rights, and, from the mid-1980s, comprehensive development started to replace project-specific development undertaken by individual work units, and became the main form of urban land development.

A more comprehensive reform was carried out from 1986 to 1988. During this period, the state raised rents in the public sector and initiated housing subsidies for all public-sector employees. Meanwhile, public-sector housing was increasingly sold to existing tenants. In 1988, the Ten Year Reform Strategy began to encourage urban residents to buy from their work units the houses in which they had been living (Wang and Murie 1996, 1999). It also formulated new housing-finance arrangements and restructured rents in the public sector. In the same year, the State Council issued the Implementation Plan for a Gradual Housing System Reform in Cities and Towns, which signaled that housing reform was to be spread out from pilot tests and experiments in selected cities to all urban areas (Wang and Murie 1996, 1999).

Since 1991, local governments have been encouraged to take their own initiative in producing reform plans according to their local social and economic conditions. In 1994, the State Council issued Decisions on Deepening the Urban Housing Reform and its explanatory documents which explained the overall strategy of housing reform based on all previous experiments and local practices. Under the new strategies, the state aimed to establish a dual housing-provision system for low-income families and high-income households separately. More specifically, affordable or so-called “budget” housing would be made available for sale to middle- or low-income households and rent-controlled housing would be available for the poorest. And people with high incomes would buy or rent commodity housing, accompanied by a gradually established housing insurance and loan system.

In 1998, the central government officially abolished the public-housing provision system, with housing provision through real-estate markets replacing in-kind allocation. Since then, instead of employers, property developers or the housing market more generally met the housing requirements of public-sector employees directly. The majority of public-sector employers were only supposed to issue housing subsidies to their employees, instead of being directly involved in housing construction, distribution, and management. Housing units built were sold on the open market, with prices determined by the prevailing market conditions. By then, the nature of housing in urban China had largely been transformed from welfare provision to commodity (Li 2000; Wang 2001; Huang and Clark 2002).

Along with the housing reform, the state had created a group of consumers who had the ability to carry out the consumption “revolution” from the 1980s (Zhang 2002; Zhang and Yap 2002), to maintain the powerful engine of China’s economic growth. The center of domestic consumption switched from food in 1980s to electronic goods in the early 1990s, to apartments and houses, automobiles and new leisure activities in the mid-1990s (Davis 2000; Croll 2006: pp. 32–57). By the end of the 1990s, commercial housing sold by the development companies replaced the work-unit public housing and created a class of homeowners in a very short period of time. A 2005 national survey suggests that housing consumption, which did not exist in pre-reform China, is now among the top three items on the consumption list of most urban families, following food and clothes (Zhou 2005), and in particular is the rise of gated communities targeting homeowners who are seeking privileged status in the form of quality housing choices, security of residential communities, professional management services, and residential segregation.

In Shenyang, the changing housing contract was accompanied by SOE reforms which introduced market competition and switched the social-welfare provider for urban residents from work units to the market. On the one hand, the SOE reforms were accompanied by bankruptcies of large number of SOEs which laid-off thousands of workers. The loss of employment, income, and social securities led to widespread poverty among those people, for whom their work-unit housing was their only security in life. On the other hand, the housing reform has created a group of homeowners who identify their privileged social status through their residency in gated communities. Status is no longer attached to big SOEs, but is more about market-oriented symbols, such as prestigious living in urban gated communities.

Middle-class gated communities in urban China

In their influential work on gated communities in the United States, Fortress America, Blakely and Snyder (1997) presented the most frequently discussed typology of gated communities. According to the specific functions of the community, Blakely and Snyder have identified three main categories of gated communities in the United States: lifestyle, prestige, and security-zone communities. Each category serves particular groups of residents. With a particular focus on affluent seniors, lifestyle communities focus on leisure activities with recreational facilities, common amenities, and shared services, which may include retirement villages, golf community clubs, or suburban new towns. Prestige communities serve as symbols of wealth and status for image-conscious residents as well as enhancing and protecting the image of and property value in the neighborhood. In security-zone communities, residents initiate the erection of gates and barricades and close off public streets to nonresidents. They reflect a fear of outsiders who disrupt neighborhoods. Although these three categories of gated communities are essentially ideal types, in reality their distinctions and characteristics often overlap.

Gated communities in China share some the key features of gated communities in western countries, such as their presenting a privileged lifestyle based on a certain level of affluence of the residents. In Shenyang, like many other cities in China, advertisements of newly built gated communities fill newspapers and glossy magazines, TV commercials and street advertising boards, and the internet. The advertising slogans can be seen everywhere: “Ideal for White Collar Elites!” or “Become a neighbor to nobility!”, linking housing and lifestyle with the pursuit of status. To promote an image of high-quality life, the entrances to those estates are often marked by magnificent gates, sometimes in the style of elaborate baroque facades. Many real-estate developers put much effort into the sale of a prestigious lifestyle as part of their brand rather than merely promoting their apartments. Mr. 31 still remembers how impressed he was 15 years ago when he came to see the real estate for the first time:

They did a great advertisement. In addition to newspaper and TV commercials, they had a special sales team to introduce the estate. They just made me feel that being a homeowner here really represents a high social status. When they were advertising, they said this estate has the quality of the new century, European style, like you are living in Venice.

(Interview No. 31)

Gated communities in China also introduced professional services provided by property-management companies to replace work units to manage community facilities. Before the housing reform, individual work units were usually the sole providers of community infrastructure and services. The municipality was generally reluctant to invest in the infrastructure as this did not directly contribute to municipal revenue, and community services were defined as a welfare function of the work units. Since the housing reform, community services have been defined as the tertiary economic sector, and many service functions have been removed from workplaces and are run by independent companies or the private sector (Wu 2005, p. 240). Some estates adopt so-called “enclosed property management” which is becoming very popular.

Like elsewhere, the privileged status of gated communities is also about privacy and social exclusion. In the case of China, the gated communities not only separate different social groups, but also the residents’ life in work units and in their residence. Under Mao, the urban spatial setting in China was oriented and segregated by “work-unit zones” where the work unit controlled the urban land use, carried out production, and organized urban administration and social control. In other words, work units extended their control to urban residents’ residential realms, including managing community affairs, mobilizing residents, and implementing political propaganda. Since the housing reform, gated-community residency has weakened ties between residents’ workplaces and residences, when the resident becomes a client rather than a favored employee (Gaubatz 1995; Wang and Murie 1999; Ma 2002; Wu 1998, 2002, 2005). Residents see their gated community as private space without any unwanted disturbance. Y community was chosen to represent the modern and high-quality image of local gated communities when the Party Central Discipline Committee came to the local district for an inspection. To welcome the inspection committee, the local government office posted many anti-corruption flyers and slogans in the community. The residents felt they were being disturbed and requested that the management company take down all the flyers and slogans. Mr. 61, a middle-aged public servant, was very annoyed when seeing the anti-corruption flyers and slogans in his community: “That was too much [posting]. This is our private life and private space, not a political propaganda office. I don’t want to live in an environment like that. They [the local government office] should leave us alone here” (Interview No. 61). Although public servants are a major group of residents in gated communities, they show no difference from the private business residents when it comes to protecting their privacy in gated communities.

As a result, gated-community residency has significant implications for identifying middle classes in urban China. The changing housing contract leads to residents being filtered by socioeconomic status, and leads to gated-community residency being a status symbol. Particularly for private entrepreneurs, the pursuit of status is not limited to wealth accumulation, but how their wealth is presented also contributes to the pursuit of their status. According to Mr. 41, a successful businessperson:

It has to be a gated community, because that is the only way to make sure the status of your neighbors is pretty much the same. Housing in China today is the most important thing. Once you have your housing, you have your life, because that is the only guaranteed part of your social status.

(Interview No. 41)

Despite sharing some common features with its counterpart in western societies, gated-community residency in China is distinctive because it is intertwined with the reward system shaped by socialist institutions and marketization. As a result, gated-community residency has not only distinguished Chinese urban middle classes from other social groups, but also shows differences between gated communities and their residents.

Despite the common factors of prestige and class segregation associated with gated-community residency, gated communities in China do not shape privileged social status in the form of particular functions as described in Blakely and Snyder’s framework. Instead, it is the various accesses to housing resources that characterize different types of gated communities in urban China. Directly resulting from the housing reform, the variety in access to housing resources is part of changing reward-distribution systems due to the interactions between the market and socialist institutions. Through those reward systems, housing consumption, most of the time, is not limited to individual affordability, but is largely associated with the quantity and quality of the rewards distributed by the groups individuals belong to. For Chinese middle classes, sometimes it is the group’s ability to obtain housing resources that determines individuals’ abi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: the emergence of China’s housing middle class: homeownership, gated communities, and life chances in urban China
• 1 Prestige and privileges: three types of gated community and two groups of housing middle class
• 2 Formation of China’s housing middle class: homeownership and “the system” impact
• 3 Privilege beyond salary: reward distribution and socioeconomic status
• 4 Bifurcated lifestyles: consumption, social relationships, and perceptions
• 5 Middle-class homeowner activism: the limits of participation in neighborhood governance
• Conclusion: the housing middle class and social stratification in urban China
• Appendix
• Index