Special Issue on the Dynamics and Consequences of Recent Shifts in Chinese Housing Policy: An Introduction

China is at a critical stage of rebuilding its housing policy framework to address the rising housing affordability crisis the country now faces. The four decades of housing reform, characterized by privatization and marketization, have significantly improved the overall living conditions of urban households, but also led to rising housing costs, deteriorated housing affordability, and increased housing inequality in many Chinese cities (Fang et al., 2020; Huang & Li, 2014). The housing reform also led to profound social and spatial transformations in Chinese cities (Huang & Li, 2014).

Since 2007, affordable housing for all has emerged as the centerpiece of China’s national housing policy framework (Deng et al., 2011; Fang et al., 2020; Huang, 2012). While taking strong regulatory actions to curb market housing speculation and price inflation (Wu et al., 2016), the Chinese government has dramatically increased funding to expand affordable housing production (Liu et al., 2021). Between 2011 and 2015, China constructed 40.13 million units of affordable housing, a remarkable achievement that exceeded its own ambitious goal of 36 million units for these five years. Among them, 13.59 million units were subsidized rental housing funded through the Cheap Rental Housing Program and the Public Rental Housing Program, whereas the rest were subsidized ownership units. Yet controversies and challenges remain. Market housing prices continue to rise, with affordable housing provision lagging behind the rising demand. Subsidized housing projects have been criticized for their inferior locations, poor access to services, and misallocation and insufficient management (Dang et al., 2014; Liu & Wong, 2015; Yang et al., 2014).

Given these challenges and policy shifts, how does China fit into the international scholarship of comparative housing policy? How do China’s recent experiences extend or challenge the existing knowledge on the role of government in shaping a country’s housing outcomes across different institutional contexts? How has housing inequality—and the actions the Chinese government has taken to address it—affected residents’ well-being and daily-life experiences?

China presents a unique case to study the processes and consequences of housing policy. Its marketized urban housing system only emerged three decades ago, out of a centrally planned, socialist welfare system. The state-controlled land system and the household registration system (hukou) have continued to influence how housing is developed and allocated in cities. China’s urban housing reform since the 1980s resembled the global trend of neoliberal housing policy, despite different political and institutional contexts (Lee & Zhu, 2006; Wang et al., 2012). Privatization of public housing and marketization of housing production and consumption had been the core features of China’s housing policy until the early 2000s (Deng et al., 2011). Yet policy changes in the past decade reflected the Chinese government’s intention to rebalance social equity with economic development while moving away from the neoliberal, growth-driven approach that had defined the country’s housing system (Fang et al., 2020). This evolving, hybrid nature of China’s housing regime could challenge and extend existing typologies of national housing systems in the international scholarship.

On the other hand, there are also many shared challenges between China and the rest of the world. Like what was seen in the United States and other western economies, housing inequality has become a driving force for the rising wealth gap and the reproduction of social inequality in the Chinese society (Zhu, 2018). Housing availability determines how people access social and economic opportunities, thus shaping their everyday life experiences in their communities and the larger society. On a macro level, the decentralization of government responsibilities has granted local governments autonomy in policy development and implementation. Consequently, economic and fiscal pressures have hampered local governments’ ability to deliver affordable housing, leading to great variations in local housing policy performance (Deng et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2021).

It is in this context that we organize this special issue on the Dynamics and Consequences of Recent Shifts in Chinese Housing Policy in Housing Policy Debate. The special issue was partly sponsored by the International Association for China Planning, which issued the call for papers in January 2020 and convened special sessions at its 2020 Annual Conference. The special issue includes six articles presenting empirical studies on this theme. The six articles address a range of topics, including an assessment of recent Chinese government efforts to promote equitable access to subsidized housing for China’s migrant population, the changing availability of affordable housing from the private rental market and its spatial implications, how decades of housing reform and recent shifts in housing policy paradigm have affected family well-being and neighborhood social relations, and, finally, an international comparison of local public housing provision across three global cities.

By examining the migrant population’s access to subsidized housing, the article by Huang and Ren (2022) assesses the effectiveness of the recent Chinese government efforts in promoting equitable and inclusive development. Migrant workers without urban hukou have long been excluded from China’s urban welfare system and are the most vulnerable to the rising housing costs. In the past decade, the Chinese central government has called for the removal of hukou status from the eligibility criteria for affordable housing programs so as to make government-subsidized housing available for the migrant population. Yet Huang and Ren have found substantial variations in the implementation of this directive at the local level: some cities have actively pursued policies to include migrant workers in their allocation of subsidized housing, whereas others have developed more subtle schemes to continue restricting migrants’ access to subsidized housing. Comparing across two waves of the nationwide China Migrants Dynamic Survey, Huang and Ren (2022) find that migrant access to subsidized rental or ownership housing improved only slightly from 2010 to 2017, which is to say that China has a long way to go to achieve its stated objective of building an inclusive housing system.

Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to expand the subsidized housing production, most affordable housing that low-income residents can access comes from the private market. Yet we know little about how such housing is supplied. Using Beijing as an example, the article by Wang and Goetz (2022) examines how the supply of affordable housing in the private rental market has changed between 2015 and 2018 and the spatial implications of these changes. Applying web-scraping techniques to compile a database of rental units from major rental listing websites, they find not only the shrinking supply and declined affordability of the private rental stock in Beijing, but also increased segregation of affordable rental units in the urban periphery with limited access to services and amenities. Although many studies have discussed the housing affordability challenges Chinese cities face, this study provides one of the first assessments on the availability of private affordable rental housing in a major Chinese city.

Can residents’ subjective well-being be affected by the political discourses of social welfare policy? This is a topic that has not been widely studied in the literature. Yet given how involved the Chinese government has been, historically, in shaping urban residents’ life and the fact that housing affordability has become a heightened concern in the country, it is reasonable to assume that urban residents in China would have high expectations regarding the government’s ability and determination to tackle this challenge. Whether the government can meet their expectations may thus affect their emotional well-being. The article by Chen et al. (2022) investigates this issue by examining regional variations in the stated government efforts in promoting affordable housing and their impacts on people’s subjective well-being. They conduct content analysis of policy discourse in the annual provincial-level Government Work Reports to capture provincial governments’ commitment to improving housing affordability during the 2010s. Combining this with micro-level data from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), they find that Chinese urban residents became happier if their provincial governments expressed a higher level of commitment to improving housing affordability in the 2011 and 2013 surveys. This is the period when the central government imposed a campaign-style enforcement of the affordable housing policy mandate on local governments, where the rhetoric of affordable housing for all dominated the policy and public discourses (Liu et al., 2021). However, this link between government priority and individual happiness became insignificant in the 2015 wave of CHFS and even negative in the 2017 wave, an indication that urban residents may have lost confidence in the government’s ability to tackle this challenge, given that housing affordability has continued to deteriorate in most Chinese cities.

Not only has residents’ emotional well-being been affected by the government’s responses to the housing crisis, their social relations and place attachment at the neighborhood level have also experienced profound changes in the last several decades due to changes in the country’s housing provision system. This special issue includes two articles that examine those changes. The article by Lu et al. (2022) focuses on the emergence of private governance (i.e., homeowners’ associations – (HOAs) in Chinese cities under housing privatization and marketization, and examines the living experiences of residents in HOA neighborhoods. Instead of first-tier mega cities, the authors chose Wenzhou of Zhejiang Province, a third-tier city yet with the most advanced private economy in urban China, as the case study. Based on a survey of 1,034 residents from 11 HOA neighborhoods, they find that residents tend to have a stronger sense of community as they become more dependent on HOAs for neighborhood services and more engaged in HOAs. Yet the living experiences in HOA neighborhoods are stratified by income, education, hukou status, and homeownership. Their research highlights the roles of HOAs functioning as “membership communities, grassroots organizations, and service providers…” (Lu et al., 2022, p. 15), a rising force in shaping the social transformation in urban China.

The second article, by Chang et al. (2022), investigates the relationship between perceived neighborhood characteristics and neighborhood attachment in the context of sociospatial inequality that has developed since the housing reform, with particular attention to how neighborhood deprivation may moderate this relationship. Based on data from a resident survey of 59 neighborhoods in Guangzhou, they find positive associations of perceived neighborhood characteristics with residents’ sense of neighborhood attachment. More importantly, they find that residents living in deprived neighborhoods are more sensitive to the perceived housing conditions when forming their sense of neighborhood attachment. This study offers useful lessons on how government can effectively respond to the challenges faced by residents living in deprived neighborhoods.

Finally, this special issue also includes an article by Li and Shamsuddin (2022) that puts China’s affordable housing policy in an international comparative perspective. This comparative study of public housing provision in three global cities—New York, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen—challenges the explanatory power of Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime typology (1990) in understanding government roles in affordable housing provision at the local level. Despite differences in political and economic contexts, all three cities have struggled to create or maintain public housing stocks to meet the rising demand for affordable housing. At the same time, all three cities have sought to attract diverse income groups as their public housing residents, although New York maintains a dual rental system whereas Hong Kong and Shenzhen have been moving toward an integrated rental system. This study demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the national-level conceptual frameworks to compare local policies and practices in affordable housing provision across different contexts.

As housing affordability has become a global concern, China’s decades of experiences in building a market housing system, and the recent efforts to expand the role of the state in addressing the failure of the market to deliver affordable housing to much of its population, can offer many valuable lessons to housing scholars and policymakers across the world. All articles in this special issue have framed their research within the context of these national housing policy shifts. Yet they all present research that is also locally grounded, showing how national policy changes have interacted with local dynamics in shaping residents’ housing and other welfare outcomes. By bringing these articles together for an international audience, we hope this special issue can help promote a more nuanced understanding of China’s housing struggles and, in doing so, help forge continued intellectual discussions among housing scholars around the world.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zhilin Liu

Zhilin Liu is an associate professor and Director of the Public Policy Institute in the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She received her doctoral degree in city and regional planning from Cornell University, USA. Her main research interests are in urban planning and governance, urban geography, housing policy and community development, rural-to-urban migration, and sustainable urbanization. (Email: [email protected])

Lan Deng

Lan Deng is a professor of urban and regional planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Associate Director of the Lieberthal–Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) at the University of Michigan. She is studying housing and real estate development in both China and the United States. Her research examines the different types of interventions the two countries have developed to ensure adequate housing and suitable living environments for their residents. (Email: [email protected]).