Urban-Rural Housing Inequality in Transitional China

Abstract

While housing was a central aspect of state socialist redistribution before China’s reform and opening-up policy, it is now a barometer of rising inequalities in an increasingly marketized economy. Based on the aggregate data of China’s 2010 census and the 2006 CGSS data, this chapter provides both a review of recent literature and an empirical analysis of Chinese housing inequality in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The main results of analysis are as follows: (1) per capita living space is larger in rural areas than in urban areas; (2) household amenities, used to measure housing quality, are much better in urban households than in their rural counterparts; (3) in both rural and urban areas there is an aggregate effect of education on housing quality and housing inequalities, but this effect disappears in the multivariate analysis of housing-level variations in living space; (4) households that are headed by cadres and professionals tend to have more living space and better amenities than those headed by manual workers. These results suggest that housing inequalities in China today reflect a mixed system, in which market and nonmarket mechanisms coexist.