Power persistence through an intergenerational perspective: inequality in private housing assets in post-reform China

Abstract

Housing inequality in (post-)socialist societies has attracted much academic attention. Prior studies have shown that reform policies mostly favored previous redistributive elites, suggesting that political elites’ housing advantage in the pre-reform system would persist in the post-reform regime. However, recent studies have also documented that political elites’ housing advantage declined with deepening marketization. While most studies have examined the power persistence theory using intra-generational analyses, we propose to evaluate it through an inter-generational perspective. Empirically, we examine the impacts of parents’ political and human capital on children’s housing assets in post-reform urban China. We find both types of capital make significant contributions. However, while the effect of parents’ human capital can be fully mediated by children’s own socio-economic status, their political capital exerts a more direct influence. Political elites’ housing advantage is not limited to their own generation, but has an enduring impact on their offsprings’ housing status and reproduces in (post-)socialist regimes.

Keywords:

• Housing inequality
• intergenerational reproduction
• market reform
• power persistence
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This was indicated by the promulgation of “The Circular of the State Council on Further Deepening the Urban Housing System Reform and Accelerating Housing” in 1998 (see http://gjj.beijing.gov.cn/web/zwgk61/_300587/szfjxgbmwj/332583/index.html, accessed on July 5, 2021)

2 There are several other national surveys that also provide detailed information on household housing assets, such as the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS). However, in those surveys, there is much missing in the information about the father’s work unit. CGSS also has some more recent waves (e.g., CGSS 2008-2017), but the information on the market prices of private housing units was not collected in those waves.

3 We provide a set of logistic regression analyses of housing tenure choice in Table A4 in the Appendix. As shown in Table A4, the most crucial contributors of homeownership in this period are respondents’ demographic characteristics such as their age and marital status. In contrast, parental characteristics, measured by fathers’ Party membership, education, and state sector job, exert little impact on respondents’ tenure choices. Respondents’ own socioeconomic status also has limited influence, and the only significant effects are from personal income and being a managerial elite (M3 & 4). In other words, during this period, housing units were still relatively affordable and the tenure choice was more influenced by personal socioeconomic status and demographic features.

4 We collect this information from CEIC (https://www.ceicdata.com/).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Committee [Direct Grant for Research #4052267] and the Faculty of Social Science [#4930984] of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Notes on contributors

Ling Zhu

Ling Zhu is an assistant professor of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include intergenerational mobility, economic inequality, occupational segregation, and state governance in transitional economies.

Di Xin

Di Xin is a student assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Silu Chen

Silu Chen is a student assistant at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.