The promise and reality of middle-class homeownership in China: housing assetisation, speculative urban (re)development and residential inequalities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper offers a nuanced understanding of China’s housing assetisation by (1) examining its role in supporting financialised urban (re)development after the global financial crisis, and (2) dissecting the contradictions between seemingly flourishing housing markets and deep-seated residential inequalities. Drawing on the case of Guangzhou, this paper first illustrates how housing assetisation internalizes financial norms within Chinese homeowner society, signifying a shift in the mode of social regulation from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. This shift is evident in the capitalization of priority access to public infrastructure and the prevailing culture of accumulation, investment and speculation. In the post-crisis era, housing has been repackaged as a lucrative investment by the local state through dazzling (sub)urban projects, large-scale infrastructure construction and ambitious urban-planning proposals, thereby fueling a home-buying frenzy. We argue that the assetisation-induced social ethos of capital accumulation and speculative investment, entwined with infrastructure-cum-property-led urban (re)development, has recast Chinese cities into shareholder-value machinery. As the local state leverages household savings and income streams to bolster land-based financialised urban development, homeowners/buyers are transformed into investor-citizens. This transformation implies that urban household balance sheets become intricately linked with China’s urban fortunes. Moreover, residential inequalities are exacerbated, exemplified by prevalent gentrification “at a premium”.