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Mengqi Wang, "Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market" (Cornell UP, 2026)
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network hi everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Yadong Li, a PhD candidate in Socio Cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. In today's episode, we will be focusing on a book that takes us into the everyday politics of home ownership on China's urban fringe where emerging migrant middle class families manage their finances, rearrange kinship obligations and marriages, and pursue their future prosperity through buying a small apartment at the edge of the Chinese city. I'm very excited to have the New Books author, Professor Wang Mengqi to join us today. So good afternoon. Meng Chi, welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Good afternoon Yadong. Thank you for inviting me.
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B
It's definitely my pleasure. Our pleasure to have you as emda. The new book today is Anxious Homes and Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market, published by Conan University Press this year, actually this month. So it's literally a brand new book. So our guest today, Wan Mengqi is Assistant professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University in China. She is a cultural and economic anthropologist whose research sits as an intersection of economic anthropology, urban studies, critical infrastructure studies and China studies with a particular focus on how the home mediates capital accumulation and Urban governance. In Kantian and Anxious Homes is her first book growing out of her long term ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Nanjing where she followed government officials, developers, brokers and home buyers to see how an entire housing market was built from the bottom up at China's urban periphery. So to begin the whole conversation, Meng Qi, could you please introduce yourself to our audience and tell us what first drew you to study housing as an ethnographic topic, especially this low end first home market on the urban peripher in Nanjing city's eastern region.
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C
Sure. Hello everyone. My name is Meng Qi Wang and I'm a economic anthropologist. I focus on urban anthropology, the economic study of the market. I was drawn to the study of housing from a very early age. Part of my family works in construction, so that was definitely one of the reasons that I was drawn to the study of housing. But it was by accident that I came to study the market for first time home buyers at urban periphery. When I was looking for a place to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation research, one of my mentors was visiting Nanjing University. So he introduced me to Professor Fanke at Nanjing University, who then introduced me to the real estate broker that he knew. And that real estate agency became my primary fuel site. And the housing projects they primarily serviced became the market that I study. And that was market as urban periphery.
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B
Well, thank you very much for sharing this. I mean, I think anthropological research always begins with some accidents. And I really like knowing these accidents because to some extent the sometimes just like destiny, because in today's China, we cannot avoid talking about housing and buying a house in our everyday life, in our everyday conversation. And this is definitely what the book is about. So in the book you follow real estate brokers, developers, officials, and first time home buyers in places like Eastern Town in Nanjing, and they become your key interlocutors. I mean, the first time home buyers. So who are these first time largely migrant home buyers you work with? And how does it differ from the more familiar figure of Chinese migrant workers, Ao Nong Min Gong, that much of the existing scholarship has focused on?
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C
So most of the buyers there, they were migrants in Nanjing, which means they don't have a local hukou. So to briefly explain what hukou means to the audience, the hukou is a household registration system that has been used in China since the late 1950s. So the system registers and categorizes households according to the location of their residency. And in communist China, this was a system that the state used to organize the planned economy. It was also used to control population mobility, that is, you can't really travel to work in a different place. That was not where your hukou was. And nowadays the hukou is very much tied to local citizenship because local government uses it to distribute social services, including pension, medical insurance, and access to public schooling. So in the early years of the market reform, what happened was that of course dismantling of the planned economy means that people can move to look for better employment opportunities in the big cities. So there were a large population moving from rural areas and smaller cities to the big cities for better economic opportunities. And there were a lot of study of this population. And there were a lot of studies on one hand on migrant workers, migrant workers as being a especially migrant workers coming from rural areas who are now becoming the major labor force that present in Chinese cities. There were also some other studies on migrant entrepreneurs, they're much more privileged and affluent people who travel to start business in bigger Chinese cities. So these are the, I would say, two major strands in the literature here. So the buyers that I followed, they are both similar and different than those studied in previous literatures. Of course, that they are similar in the sense that they don't have a local hukou. Right. But they are a little bit different because they are on path to become a local citizen and they expect that. And a lot of them, from my observation, a lot of them have college degrees and they are working in more stable jobs such as schools and governments, which appeared as stable middle class jobs. And so I think, I think the difference, really, not really a difference, I would say a mismatch, is that there is a very strong sense of this desire for a secured place in the city that is present in this population. And there is a strong aversion to precarity or transience or whatever tag of mobility that got attached to the population of migrants. So these are the population that came to buy homes at the market. But it's quite interesting that in this question you sort of listed the primary interlocutors, including brokers, government officials, developers. Your question is about the first time, largely migrant home buyers. Right. I think that that is interesting because that is actually this kind of contrast actually shows attention that I had been struggling with as I was developing this book. I was trained as an economic anthropologist and I started the field research actually to study the formation of the housing market, which means I follow diverse actors who assemble the market. But one tension that I had been struggling with was whether this is a book about the market or is this a book about the first time home buyers, migrant home buyers. So I think that's quite interesting. That is also shown in your question. But in the end, this is a book about the market, not just about the home buyers.
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B
Excellent. Thank you for this reminder. I think we will discuss how first time home buyers are important, but they are not the only protagonist of the book. I think in your word exactly, the market itself will be the protagonist. But I think in discussing this very specific group of new and often ignored migrants in Chinese cities, your book really perfectly situates this ethnographic context in a broader hysterical context, which is simultaneously post socialist and neoliberal. A post socialist because your interlocutors emerge out of the rural and urban hukou system and neoliberal because what makes them distinctive is their identity. It's attached to the private property and the housing market, which we will discuss throughout Our conversation, and then we will turn to the specific place you did your fieldwork. The Qilimen era and Eastern Town are what planners might call a rural urban fringe or urban periphery. As someone who grew up in China in the early 21st century, the urban rural fringe, or Chengxiangji Hebu, is a familiar space to me. I think every city has its own urban legends about this kind of area. And in your research, you treat urban periphery as a critical site for understanding China's development and housing markets. So why this particular space, or more specifically, what makes Nanjing's or China's urban periphery such an important space for. For you? For ethnographic research, I would first say
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C
that the urban periphery is obviously a place, right? It's the setting, the geographic setting of the fieldwork and of the book. But it is also a space that is a product of a certain economic and social relationship, right? So the idea of the periphery is something that is defined in relation to a center. And I found that quite interesting. The center, if we envision the center as something opposite to the periphery, it could be neighborhoods in the more desired central locations in the city. But in general, it is more interesting to think of that, to think that is something more general, such as the city itself, right? So the center, which is the city that is imagined, that is imagined as a object of desire, that is something that the people, especially the first time home buyers, aspire to be part of, right? And so the periphery is really their current situation. They occupy such a peripheral status and a peripheral location in many senses, right? In terms of their migrant status, in terms of where they can afford to buy a home. So I think that becomes something that I wanted to explore not in this book, but also in my future projects. But let's go back to the periphery as a space, as a place, because the periphery, the urban periphery, the urban rural fringe, also speaks a lot about China's urbanization process. I think I can unpack that maybe later. But right now, what I wanted to point out is that as Chinese cities urbanize, the city becomes bigger and bigger and it takes in land from nearby areas, mostly rural areas, right? So all of those peripheral space, the urban, rural fringe, what we see is that they have a mixed population of people with rural and urban hukou, and they also have these space, also have the mixed property regimes, right? They were land that is, that is being developed, but. Right. Standing right next to that housing project that is a, you know, a rice field, right? It's like a rural, very rural things that you, you will See there, which is exactly what's what happened in my field site. So you see that. And, and of, and also it's naturally you can imagine, right, the land price is housing price, there is cheaper, right? And because of the cheap land price and the very disparate property regimes that developers really, maybe government as well, really see these as investment frontiers, right? These are the space that you can take advantage of the cheap land price and you can build housing there. And this becomes the space where I would say accumulation, urban accumulation happens, right? So I think the periphery, really, you can approach it from multiple angles, you can approach it as a status, as a place, as a site of accumulation, and that's why it becomes really interesting. And I explored that in the introduction of the book.
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B
Fascinating, fascinating. Thank you very much for explaining, you know, why periphery is such an important setting. And I think we will talk about the spatial setting of your research. Now, of course, I think it's necessary to chat about the temporal setting. A key backdrop of the book is the shift from socialist housing, the people gender and the rural urban two tier hukou system to the contemporary money based housing where private home ownership has been tightly bounded up with urban citizenship status. So how do you understand the continuities and ruptures between these two areas of housing entitlement? And how did that hysterical transformation enable today's property hukou bundle? What you mentioned in the book, where owning an apartment becomes a pathway to urban citizenship in China.
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C
Thank you for asking this question. It allows me to unpack things I didn't get a chance to say in the the previous questions. So one very important feature of China's housing market is that it is deeply entangled with population governance. For example, one strong motivation for the buyers, for the home buyers I started there was that they are buying a property, they are pursuing home ownership to secure a local hukou. And now I can expand a bit more on what a hukou is and how that is tied to homeownership. So in social times, housing was a benefit entitled to all. In the cities, people live in assigned apartments given to them through their equally assigned state employment. Employment in state owned enterprises or collectives. And in the countryside, in rural areas, everybody has a housing lodge, it's called jai jid. Every family will receive a housing lot from the rural collectives. And remember I also mentioned that the hukou system also fixed population mobility. So you're pretty much fixed, right? You're fixed, you have a place of residence and then you have a local employment. And if you want to Travel and you need to get approval, right? So that was all done to service the planned economy. And the market reform of housing will have to have to deal with several things, right? And one of the things is these land regimes that, the communist land regimes that, that has been in place in the past 30 years. So what happened in the housing marketization reform was first of all a privatization of socialist housing stocks. And then the government really need to figure out how they can implement a market. So what happened in 1980s and 1990s was that the government declared that all urban land, all land, actually all land in China are owned by the state. So the state ownership of land actually became a law in the 1980s when China was about to have a housing market. So this means that land becomes a asset owned by the state, right? And the state could lease the youth rights of the land to developers, but only in the cities. So the consequence is that the local governments become the de facto owner of land and they keep the rent as revenue. And this is quite, this is a very significant point because land revenue now accounts for a large portion of income for local governments in China. There were some research done in this area. I think for some governments, the rent revenue can be as high as 50% of their entire annual fiscal budget. That's a very important factor. And in the meantime, the hukou system is still here, right? Market reform doesn't mean that China completely becomes liberal. Of course it's not the case. So the hukou system is still here, but instead of being something to be used by, to be used for state level economic planning in the planning economy, it is now become a tool for local governments to strategize development. So imagine that now you're the local government, right? You have land as a resource you can monetize on and you have system you can govern the population, right? What, what are you going to do? And that is why some scholars call urban government, city governments in China call them as an entrepreneur government, right? So what happened is that the government would actually use these resources to strategize urban development. And this is the background of the implementation of the housing market. And one of the most prominent, most important, actually policies that I addressed in my book is this policy that, that links home ownership to the local hukou status. For example, in Nanjing, if you're a migrant, if you buy a property, you get a local hukou. And that, frankly speaking, was a major drive for a lot of these migrants who come to buy a tiny, tiny apartment at the urban periphery. But I also do want to emphasize that it is not a when policy, one size fits all policy. So what is important is the link between home ownership and the local hukou status. In some cities, Beijing and Shanghai, even if you have a local hukou, they. You can't. You can't. You can't buy a. You can buy a property easily. You know, there's something. Wait, I think, yeah, In Beijing and Shanghai. Sorry, Even if you've been stayed there for. Because in Nanjing, if you stay there for three years, one party says that if you stayed in Nanjing for three years, you can buy a property. But in Beijing and Shanghai, because they don't really want to encourage their local housing market anymore. So they already have like such an inflated housing price. So if you have to stay there for 10 years or something to get a. To get the permission to buy a property. So you see, really this link. This link is like very flexible, right? It allows government to flexibly design plans of development, of urban development.
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B
Definitely, definitely. I think we have already had lots of studies on China's hukou system from different discipline, and we can speak all day around this institution, this system. So this is the magic of anthropology, because you take us into this system through a narrower but very important entry point to which we were not 10 based all the information provided. We can turn to the most important keyword of your research, which is also in the subtitle of your book. This term is inflexible demand, or gangxu in Mandarin Chinese. A term that begins in microeconomics and then travels into state policy to real estate marketing and everyday conversation among brokers and home buyers and, you know, ordinary people. So what makes a demand so necessary that it becomes inflexible? How did Gang Xu come to define a particular segment of the Chinese housing market and a particular group of people with the company of, you know, the hukou system?
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C
So the kind of need for a local hukou obviously is one reason behind the inflexible demand. Right. But let me first explain what inflexible demand is. So it's a vernacular term that I found that I encountered in my field in doing field work. It's in Chinese called gangxu, and I translated that as inflexible demand. When I came to study, when I came to do field work in Tsiningbun and I. And there were like all sorts of. It was during the boom time of China's real estate economy that a lot of people came to buy properties and the sales were rising. And I kept on asking people, why? Why do you Come to buy properties here, right? Still quite expensive. And you obviously invested everything you borrowed from all of your relatives to buy a tiny, tiny apartment in a not very desirable location in Nanjing. I ask people all the time and frequently replied me saying I have an inflexible demand, I have a gan hu, right? Which means. Which is really not answering my question. It's just saying that I have a need, I have to do this. So over, over and over again I started to say, wait a second, maybe this could be a keyword of my study. Maybe I should really look at why people are using this word to express a demand, a need to buy a property in this market. So I started to do a bit more research on this term ganxu. So ganxu in Chinese originally, it actually means inelastic demand in elastic demand, which is a microeconomic concept, meaning the relative stable demand of goods essential to human survival, right? So regardless of price fluctuations, right? The microeconomic series, right? The market, the price is determined by supply demand mechanisms, right? But there's also elasticity of the price, right? For certain goods, such as. Certain goods such as, you know, bread, water or rice, right? Prescription drugs or something like that. So the demand is very stable, right? And that. And it may. The price may fluctuate if the, if the, if the supply changes, but not that much because the demand is ready. It is, it is a need, right? We say that's a need. So this term was originally used as a Chinese translation of inelastic demand, a short term for the Chinese translation of inelastic demand, actually. And you will see that in a lot of papers, policy analysis that published around 2000, when the government was trying to implement the housing. Implement housing mortgage system in China to encourage housing marketization and financialization, you will see a lot of that. But this has been used mostly by policy experts and economists, so not by average person. It was a very technical term. And in the earliest record I can find is in 2006 when a developer. So that's a layperson, right? A developer used this term, used this term in a housing commercial. And the developer put on a housing. It was a media report of the housing commercial. The developer said, well, in Shanghai, the developer said, in our project, our housing development in Shanghai, this one is designed for. Designed for inflexible demand population. It's designed for people who have an inflexible demand. A gang Shu of housing in Shanghai, which means this project has very efficient floor plan. It has relatively speaking affordable housing prices, right? And it is for those, for young People who want to buy their first home, who have a hard demand of things, of a property, of housing. And starting from 2006, just from that one incident, you started to see that this term becomes much more popular in everyday language. So I started my field work in 2013, and from 2013 to 2015, it was already part of everyday language. Right. And so the buyers obviously would say, I have an inflexible demand. And the real estate agency I stayed with, and they would say they are, they would tell me that they specialized in service, inflexible demand population. And so the brokers would also use that term. Right. And they would say, well, this is a property for inflexible demand. It's. It's affordable, It's. It's really important. We are doing service to these people. We're helping them to get on the property ladder. And the developer, interestingly, the developer also very much capitalized on that term. So Eastern Town, you already mentioned the name of the development I studied. So Eastern Town is a mega housing project. It is built upon large parcels of land at the urban periphery. It has sturdy thousand apartments. So it's huge. And it actually earned. But also the property there is like very cheap. So it actually earned the nickname of Eastern Nanjing's number one inflexible demand development. So inflexible demand really becomes a label that's being placed on this development. Right. And it's also a market niche. Right. You market that as an inflexible demand development to attract buyers. And one last, actors who use this term are government officials and in fact the state. State uses the term. So in official discourses, you will see that in news media and sometimes China's top leaders, when they address housing issues, they will invok this term. They would say, let's regulate the housing market and make sure that it meets people's inflexible demand for housing. Right. So you see, diverse. There were diverse uses of this term without actual consensus on what exactly what this term means. Exactly. So the argument of the book is that actually it is through diverse uses of this term that the market comes into shape, that this housing market comes into existence.
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B
Perfect, I think, to think of what objects are deemed as exchangeable and what objects are seen as necessary for one to be a proper human, and how they are made so have always been a key topic in anthropology. And I think your book, as an ethnography of contemporary China also contributes to this classic discussion of gifts and material culture. And in the book you argue that inflexible Demand housing is not just an abstract category, but is financed and lived in deeply gendered ways, especially through the practice and narratives about buying hun farm or marriage homes or home for marriage. This is a very deep and important thesis based on your ethnographic observation. So can you tell us a little bit about how gender expectations around marriage provision and family shape the politics of home buying? And how does the discourse of inflexible demand obtain its moralistic purchase through the discursive image of women?
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C
Okay, so while I was answering the last question, basically I listed all of the different ways in which diverse actors, different actors use inflexible demand, right? And it's interesting to think why everybody gravitates towards the concept and find it useful. And the ways in which it has been used gives us a feeling that it's self evident, right? It's like, of course, self evidence taken for granted. Why wouldn't you need a property, right? Of course you need a home. That's like, you don't have to defend that. And it's highly moralized discourse, highly moralized concept and highly moralized discourse saying that we all need a property. And in chapter three, which is about gender, I put that in chapter three and relatively higher in the order of the chapters because I think, where does that moral purchase come from? Why do people feel that it's self evident, you need a, you need a home? I think if you want to look at where that moral purchase comes from, it comes from. You will have to take a gendered aspect and gendered perspective. You have to take gender as a lens to study who's making a moral claim to a home. And, and why do people feel that? Why is, how is that claim substantiated, right? How does that claim becomes concrete in everyday life? And the angle I took was gender. So in the buyers, among the buyers who came to buy a property in Eastern Town, I would say the majority of them are either young males or young couples coming to buy a home, to settle. And by settling they mean to get married, to have children, to live a normal life, right? In their, in their mind, a normal life in the, in the, in the city, to be a urban citizen in Nanjing. And, and so I end up talking to a lot of these young males who came to buy a property. And these are also the people who, who replied the most that, you know, I have an inflexible demand. But if you push them further, if you say just why, you know what, can you tell me more about your demand for a home? And a lot of them would say, well, because I need to get married, right? Because I need to have a home, I need to start a family, right? And then you will have to follow them as an anthropologist. You have to look at all the other relationships in the picture, right? And their girlfriend, and their girlfriend or their wife will come into the picture. And turns out that this home buying is a major life event for these people, right? So for these males, there's a very strong sense of male owner, that they have to provide home, have to provide home to the woman and to their family, right? And it's not easy because housing price is really high. So oftentimes in practice, it comes down to the male's family to provide a down payment, because the down payment will symbolize the male contribution to the marriage. And it's quite significant. And the man would come up with a down payment. And then oftentimes it's either the man or the man or woman. Together they will take on a mortgage to finance the rest of the property. So the process is very much gendered. And for the woman's family, they would contribute in different ways. Sometimes they would pay for furnishing, decorating, the decoration of the apartment. Sometimes they would provide a car or things like that. But the home, the house, the property is very much coded as a male contribution, a male responsibility. So if we look at this case, right? If we look at how the house, the property becomes a part of the marriage preparation, then it is very obvious that where does the inflexible demand and its moral again becomes a moral concept. That his home ownership is not simply a thing you consume, it's actually a essential part of social and biological reproduction, right? It is embedded in this process, which means when you buy a property, you're buying the property to further social and biological reproduction. You're not buying it with the idea of selling it in the future for more money, right? So it's really not a logic of equivalency. Logic equivalency is very much frowned upon by actors in my field. It's actually a logic of transcendence, right? The home, the property symbolizes something transcendent. Transcendent. It is a source of difference. Source of difference rather than equivalency. If we look at how it is embedded in. In family planning, in family planning and reproduction.
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B
Yes. I find your concept of transcendence really illuminating because it reveals how this kind of inflexible demand housing market is always revolving around some demands beyond the immediate need of living, but related to the desire and also the need to become a proper human related to the identity of a man of women, but also about class. Here I want to say, besides this often taken for granted gender dimension in inflexible demand housing market, another dimension you highlight in the book is class. Buying a private property in the city is crucial for migrant middle class home buyers to sustain their hope for upward mobility. But at the same time, this housing market also facilitates the reproduction of class in urban China. So how does this low end inflexible demand segment of the housing market operate as a class project? And in what sense are your interlocutors both included in and squeezed by this real estate driven urban growth?
- [39:21]
C
So this is a difficult question because I actually struggled a lot to write the class chapter, but it's quite important. It's quite important. And, and the ways in which I did it in the end in the book was to focus on the daily interactions between brokers and home buyers because I think through these interactions you will be able to observe the careful crafting of differences in status that emerged in the process. Right. So I guess as anthropologists we're not. Yeah, I guess we're more comfortable talking about smaller things, right? More everyday life interactions. So yeah, so I'm not making, I guess I'm not trying to make a grand narrative about this new class being formed or it's urban, or trying to change any existing dialogue about class in China. But what really interested me is to look at how homeowner status becomes a major status marker in people's negotiations of their position in the city. So my primary interlocutors are actually the brokers. I spend most of my time with the brokers and they are the people who led me to, who open doors to me, open doors to other actors. So I observed most how brokers interact with buyers and developers and other actors and the brokers, they are a very interesting group of people because they are also migrants themselves. But I guess I mentioned that the home buyers there, they mostly have college degrees and brokers, they mostly do not have a. Some of them do, but most mostly they don't really need a college degree to work as a real estate broker. Right. And their job is much more precarious than let's say the job of a government of government clerk or a teacher in a local primary school. Right. Even though the brokers actually make more money, but it's much more, but their income is much more irregular. So there is this interesting tension between the brokers and the people they service. So their income might be similar or brokers might make more money, but because the buyers, they have college degrees, they are in more stable middle class jobs. So there's always this perception that the buyers have a slightly higher class position than the brokers. So the brokers are also very much aware of that and they would craft their language when interacting with the buyers in order to make a deal, in order to say, this is a house, you deserve to buy a property, you have to buy a property here. So that chapter, it is a chapter about class, but also it is very much a chapter about the market as well, about how the secondary market of house of properties are formed in the very careful and clever crafting of selling techniques in the hands of the brokers.
- [43:24]
B
Fascinating, Fascinating. I really feel really happy to have this chance to talk about how this market is formed not only by the home buyers, but also by multiple actors involved, particularly the brokers. And I think our readers can really benefit from reading the book itself to know more about its discourses, its practices, its histories and stories. They're very interesting. But I think chapter four is a striking shift in the book. You move from migrant home buyers, from officials, from brokers, to resettled villages whose collected land has been annexed and turned into urban real estate. So why was it important for you to devote a chapter to these villages? And how do the experiences of compensation, planting houses and negotiating home dismantling of chaitin help you think about the relationship between landed estate and localized practices of citizenship in China's urban peripheries?
- [44:23]
C
Okay, thank you for asking that question. So I said that this book is about the market. And initially when I was thinking about. Yeah, and not just initially, but even now, if you look at the order of the chapter, the chapter four, I have six chapters and chapter four is the first chapter in the second part of the book, I have six chapters, I divided them into two parts. So the first part is called Inflexible Demand, which is really looking at inflexible demand from different angles. Right. The citizenship angle and the language. Right. How people, different people use that. And the third one is gender. Right. Where? Why? You know why it is such a. Why it is a moral concept. Right. Why there's a moral sense attached to this concept. And for the second part of the book, the three chapter in the second part of the book, I was actually trying to mimic the process of a real estate development. Right. So naturally you start with land assembly. Right, Land assembly. And then the second one following this chapter was on home pre sales. Right. You start to sell properties, then the final One is a secondary market which is between the brokers and the home buyers and home sellers. So that chapter was there. One of the reasons was that I wanted to go through the full cycle of the development. But it is also very important because resettled villagers, this kind of land resettlement, it speaks to how the home and land becomes a site of urban accumulation in this process. So that chapter is really looking at how the government monetize rural estate and transform and turn the rural estate into land that is available to be sold to developers for, for development. So I think that process shows. Yeah, that process shows that is a very important stage, right? Very important stage of urban accumulation. How capital is being accumulated from things that is non fungible to things that are not only fungible but also can be financialized, right? Can be turned into an asset, can generate credit. So that is another reason. And the last reason that I wrote about it was actually because I wanted to further explore a theme that was discussed in chapter one, which is the connection between home ownership, between housing and citizenship. So for the local rural villages whose land is being resettled, they get compensated. And the compensation package, you might feel that was quite generous. But what interests me more is where does that entitlement to compensation? What is the logic behind the compensation? What is the logic behind them receiving the compensation? Patrick? What are the operational logics that is in place when the government calculates and negotiate compensation with the rural citizens? So one of the logics that I find interesting, and I wrote this chapter actually because of that, was the logic that the government should take care of the resettled villages. So in my case, actually the government not only provided compensation of cash and apartments, but in certain cases the resettlement or Tai Chian actually involves a rearrangement of employment. Right? Because if the government took the land that you've been farming, they would also provide some kind of employment. So it's this idea that because you have residency in the local community under this government, under the local rural government, therefore when they come to take your land, they are also responsible of ensuring that you retain some kind of location based rights of living in this region. So I think that would, so that aspect would be a nice complement, nice aspect that can complement the previous discussion of, of the relationship between housing and citizenship rights. That is how housing has always, always been a channel through which government distribute citizenship rights and provide services to people in China.
- [49:53]
B
Fantastic. I think we will talk about demand, desire and aspirations throughout this conversation. I think these concepts are all interconnected to each other. As you mentioned before inflexible demand. Housing market is marked by the quality of transcendence. That is to say, people demand a house so strongly and naturally because of some desire or aspiration beyond the immediate need of living in an apartment. And as you mentioned, villagers demand their compensation not only because of the money they need, but also because their aspirations to be treated as proper citizens with rights. So you describe the homeowners, home buyers as an aspirational migrant middle class and show how their hopes for citizenship, stability and upward mobility are concentrated in a tiny apartment at the edge of the city. So I'm very interested in the concept of aspiration or desire or the mind. So how do you understand aspiration as historically and ideologically produced in this context? And what kinds of methods were most helpful for you in studying aspiration during your field work?
- [50:56]
C
I use the word aspirational. I use that to describe this, this home buying middle class or trying to be mid people who are trying to be middle class, urban middle class. But I did not examine it too much in the book. Instead, the book is very much about people pursuing what they feel should be the bare minimum, the minimum requirement, a home of their own, that is a home of their own. So that is quite interesting because that actually propels us to question the distinction between need and want or desire or need or desire. So I guess one argument that as colleges, we are familiar with is that these binary distinctions are entirely constructed by historical and social forces. We can say that. And in my case, it is constructed. It is constructed. It is a moral economy throughout history that people come to have certain consensus about what is need, what is things that they expect that should happen, and what is things that is considered as in excess, that things that. One step further. So when people use the word gang Xu, inflexible demand, they're actually saying, I'm just asking for what I deserve to have, right? I'm asking, I have to have this right? And this is, I'm entitled to have a home in the city. And there is a moral implications of that segment, right? There is some. There are a moral undertone there, right? But I do feel that, yeah, if we wanted to talk about the aspiration, I think aspiration is. I think aspiration is in the background, is embedded in the entire setting, right? Not just for this group of people, but also maybe for China in the past several decades of economic development, right? Because you've taken for granted, people take it for granted that. Life should go on and it should get better. If you work hard, it should get better, especially for Those people who went to college, they worked hard as students, I imagine, and now they are taking things promised to them through a good education. So I think it probably is because it is embedded in the background. And if it's embedded in the background, then it goes without saying that if I follow this path, then I deserve to have a home in the city. And also if I need to get a home in the city, no matter how high the price is, I should try my best. I should do whatever I need to do to buy a property. So that also explains the drive to invest, all just to buy a tiny teeny apartment at the urban periphery. Because you just have to. There's no other way. There's no other way around. There's no other way to. There's no way to do things otherwise.
- [54:45]
B
Excellent. Thank you very much for explaining this. And I think the distinction you make, but although an ambiguous distinction between need and desire or need and aspiration is very insightful for us to think about these concepts themselves and also how to situate them in today's Chinese context. And the book's last chapter is titled Homes Unsettled. And I forgot to mention how you began the introductory section with Evergrande debt crisis and a broader cooling of Chinese housing market. So how has this recent transformation reshaped life for the families you write about in 1940, also for the brokers and others actors. And what new forms of anxiety, adjustment and even political claim making have you observed in today's China in your field site?
- [55:33]
C
Yeah, the housing market, the downturn of the housing market starting from 2020, it was a big thing, right? It unsettled a lot of these assumptions I observed and wrote about in this book. So one of the assumptions that was everywhere when I was doing field work was that housing price will forever increase and that you need to get a property as soon as possible. So you can be in the club, right? So you can be part of this homeowning class and, and you can have the hope to catch up with development, right? In the future you may be able to move to bigger apartments that's closer to the city center. You can climb something, right? And that is now obviously unsettled. That assumption now is gone, right? The price stagnated. And when we talk about, when we talk about China's recession, the recession in the real estate economy. And one thing that I observed since 2020 was that actually a lot of these housing development, that seeing price stagnation and seeing housing price drops, these are actually development of inflexible demand housing Projects, The properties, at least in 2021, 2022, they are still housing project with price rising. And these are actually high end properties. So that is quite unfortunate. Right. Because it's. So the people who sold their home value, who saw the most loss of their home value are those who invested all and those who are mostly are financially, most financially strange, Right? Population. So that is one. Yeah, that is one trend I observed. And for Eastern Town, the housing price stopped there. And I guess many people, if they envisioned to be moving closer to the city center. Now it seems that Eastern Town is going to be their home for quite some time. But this is not necessarily a bad thing because there is a very vibrant community there because, you know, these are actual people moving to live in their apartments. Right. They have families, they are now kindergartens, they are now primary schools. Yeah. And several bus lines connecting Eastern Town to the city center. So that is a change. But if we look at other places, there may be other ganxu or inflexible demand development that are not as fortunate as this one. Because what becomes more common in the past several years is that a lot of developers, including Evergrande, because they are in debt issues. So they abandoned housing projects, ongoing housing projects, and a lot of these projects are already sold through home presale to buyers. And a lot of these buyers are inflexible demand buyers are particularly buyers who are not, are not economically affluent. So that is something that I briefly discussed in the last chapter. That is about this desire, this demand to have their first home. What if that desire does not? What if that demand turned into a nightmare? Right. What if that decision to pursue something, you know, you think is that you deserve to have turned out to be a source of regret? Right. So that is. Yeah, I only have the space to briefly discuss that in the last chapter and I hope to look more into it as the market changes.
- [60:11]
B
Yeah, exactly. And also, as we are approaching the end of today's podcast, could you share a bit about your current or future project? I know you are doing something amazing about unfinished housing project in urban China and how, you know, the home buyers really move into this kind of unfinished building. But I'd appreciate if you can share more hints with us about your current research, if possible.
- [60:34]
C
Sure. Yeah. So I've been following abandoned housing projects in China in the market recession and trying to get to, trying to collect some data on this because a lot of these victims of this abandoned housing project, they are actually people who actually had an inflexible demand. Right. They are people who are buying their first properties. I think I mentioned that earlier. So that's why I started to follow it. The actual fieldwork was more difficult to conduct again than the time when I was a graduate student and doing field work with Brockers. I think it was mostly because people are quite reluctant to talk about something unfortunate that happened to them at this level, at a level that's so close to home. But interestingly, another phenomena that happened in recent five or six years is the use of social media. On one hand I find it quite difficult to talk to actual people whose homes being abandoned in the process of construction. On the other hand, there is a proliferation of a lot of materials about abandoned construction. TikTok on little red notes on red notes everywhere. So I've collected some of them and I think that could be a digital ethnographic project. And in fact I have a short essay on abandoned housing project that's coming out with anthropology news. So that is a. So that is something that I'm doing, working on right now, but also I'm working on this. But also because you know, I mentioned in the very beginning of this interview that there's a tension. Right. This book is, I ended up deciding this book is about the market, not about the home buying people, inflexible demand people. So now I hope that went by look, studying abandoned construction, I can do more work on the population who feel they have a inflexible demand of a home in the city. And in particular, what kind of promise does inflexible demand hold for this population? Right. Yeah. So that is the direction I'm turning to right now.
- [63:27]
B
Well, it's amazing. I think this project is not only creative but also timely if I'm lauded to say so. I think this kind of research is also inflexible demand to Chinese social science today. Thank you very much for this contribution. Meng Qi, thank you very much for joining us today and for this rich tour through the anxious, contested and deeply complicated worlds of China's inflexible demine housing market.
- [63:50]
C
Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me.
- [63:53]
B
Thank you very much. So in today's episode, I had a conversation with Wang Mengqi about her new book Anxious Homes, published by Cornell University Press this year. For listeners interested in economic anthropology, contemporary China or housing justice, this book offers a vivid and powerful account of how the demand for private property are made and unmade under state led capitalist urbanization and how ordinary people negotiate both belonging and accumulation through a single apartment key. This book also invites us to think more broadly about how our own ideas of what we need or what we aspire in order to feel at home are historically produced and politically consequential. You've been listening to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li. We hope to see you next time.
- [64:38]
D
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooks network.com connect with us on Instagram and Bluesky with the handle ebooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [65:13]
C
Sa.