A zone of exception? Interrogating the hybrid housing regime and nested enclaves in China-Singapore Suzhou-Industrial-Park

Abstract

Focusing on the highly ‘successful’ China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), this study taps into a less explored topic of housing development in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) through the conceptual lenses of housing regime and enclave urbanism. Drawing on empirical evidence garnered from interviews, survey, observation, and secondary sources, this study transcends methodological nationalism and cityism to present a situated and close-up examination of housing regime at the intra-urban level. It also enriches the concept of enclave urbanism by delving into the nested enclave structure in SIP. A hybrid housing regime featuring a (neo)liberal logic in the disguise of the semi-social democratic regime for landless farmers and a productivist regime for the variegated workforce is identified. Two key players – the local state and transnational corporations, via formal and informal institutions, gave rise to a nested enclave structure. Instead of ‘a zone of exception’, SIP epitomises the ubiquitous neoliberalisation and aggravated precarity endured by low-skilled migrants, and foregrounds housing stratification and segregation within SEZs.

Keywords:

• Housing regime
• enclave urbanism
• migrant housing
• resettlement housing
• special economic zone
• precarity

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Dr Xuanwei Cao for his assistance in our fieldwork. We are grateful for the valuable suggestions and comments from anonymous reviewers, and our heartfelt thanks go to the late Professor Ray Forrest for his inspiration and Professor Ngai Ming Yip for his patience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Recently few scholars have extended the analysis of housing regime to sub-national level or city level (see Stephens, 2019; Zhou & Ronald, 2017).

2 CSSD was established in 1994, with 65 percent of the initial investment (50 million US Dollar) from the Singapore Consortium and 35 percent from the Chinese Consortium. Singapore had taken the lead in CSSD until 2001, when China and Singapore switched their shares in the company.

3 See A Brief introduction on Social Insurance (Provident Fund) system in Suzhou Industrial Park. Available at: https://www.sipspf.org.cn/publish/media/file/1494471808509.pdf (accessed on 29 December, 2019).

4 Statistics of passengers is from TNC’s own survey in December of 2017 when they plan the bus routes for 2018, e.g. to cancel the stops with less than 5 passengers.

5 News report on Suzhou Daily: Housing price raised after neighbourhoods upgrading: Resettlement neighbourhoods upgrading in Suzhou Industrial Park benefits more than 50,000 households http://news.sipac.gov.cn/sipnews/yqzt/yqzt2016/201610zdxm/xgdt/201610/t20161009_481107.htm (accessed 7 September 2018).

6 For a comparison of two different scenarios, see He et al. (2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No.: 41871165), Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University under XJTLU Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Grant (SURF201612), and Suzhou Association of Social Sciences Studies under Grant (12-B-02).

Notes on contributors

Shenjing He

Shenjing He is Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of Urban Planning and Design, and Director of the Social Infrastructure for Equity and Wellbeing (SIEW) Lab at The University of Hong Kong. Her research interests focus on urban redevelopment/gentrification, urban governance, low-income housing, rural-urban interface, and health geography.

Ying Chang

Dr. Ying Chang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and honorary member of Healthy High Density Cities Lab of Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on a range of issues on neighbourhood and housing development for disadvantaged groups in China.