Exit, or Evict: Re-grounding Rights in Needs in China's Urban Housing Demolition

Abstract

This report depicts narratives of individuals defying eviction orders in urban neighborhood dwellings in Chongqing, China. Resisting households are called “nail householders;” their rationales and subjectivities in resisting demolition foreground a social and ideological regime change increasingly tuned to private property rights' centrality. I address the primacy of “need” as a defining feature of both communism and socialism, and its practical and theoretical bearing on legitimizing neosocialist governance. I argue that an objective diagnosis in reclaiming the significance of need's due place in history and the present social reality is imperative for an accurate ethnographic reading of how ordinary Chinese people practice their rights in an era of property dispossession and counter-dispossession.