Affective Housing Ownership in China’s New Property Regime

Abstract

This article investigates the ‘affective’ dimension of Chinese urbanites’ ubiquitous practices of real estate investment and hard bargaining against housing demolition. In their endeavours regarding the active or ‘passive’ possession of housing property, investors and evictees share an immense mania and anxiety over exploiting or missing out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the property pursuit. I depict how the notion of affect, as represented by anxiety and a vernacular moral expression, conjoined to reshape urban subjectivity. The present case of housing investment mania and counter-demolition acuity in a whole new private property regime represents a fluid context for exploring affect’s concrete penetrating power that allows us to go deeper toward revealing social phenomena and sociality.