Affective Housing Ownership in China’s New Property Regime

Abstract

This article investigates the ‘affective’ dimension of Chinese urbanites’ ubiquitous practices of real estate investment and hard bargaining against housing demolition. In their endeavours regarding the active or ‘passive’ possession of housing property, investors and evictees share an immense mania and anxiety over exploiting or missing out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to participate in the property pursuit. I depict how the notion of affect, as represented by anxiety and a vernacular moral expression, conjoined to reshape urban subjectivity. The present case of housing investment mania and counter-demolition acuity in a whole new private property regime represents a fluid context for exploring affect’s concrete penetrating power that allows us to go deeper toward revealing social phenomena and sociality.

Keywords:

• Affect
• Anxiety
• Property Investment
• Demolition
• Welfare Housing Redistribution

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the editors of TAPJA and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that greatly helped to restructure an earlier version of this article. I am indebted to Ran Xueyu and Gao Minyi, who provided me with essential research assistance in the field. No government or foundation money was used in the research and writing of this article.

Notes

[1] Owing to the inherent sensitivity of the topic, the names of most of the places, companies and people have been changed, with pseudonyms used where necessary.

[2] Based on The World Bank’s (2015) report, China’s entire financial system remains government-dominated. For other countries with state-owned banks, by comparison using the same calculation, that figure is 74 per cent in India and 40 per cent or so in Russia.

[3] Such conceptualisation builds upon the line of philosophical thought from Benedict de Spinoza through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. According to Hardt (2007), Spinoza grasps the powers of affect in terms of two sets of parallels. First, the mind’s power to think is in parallel with the body’s power to act; hence, affect straddles the mind and body, as well as actions and passions, but the mind and body are autonomous, even though they proceed or develop in parallel. Second, there is a correspondence between the power to act and the power to be affected, incorporating the mind’s receptivity to external ideas and the body’s sensitivity to other bodies.

[4] The mass expression of religiosity in the form of qigong fever in the 1980–90s, as vividly depicted by Palmer (2007), provides fertile ground for an alternative, affective re-theorising. The most curious question on the affective dimension of qigong is how it has become a fever that operates outside the regular political channels and religious organisations but penetrates deeply into political power circles and spreads from body to body by creating fantasies and utopianism regarding eventual bodily wellbeing.

[5] In 2012, the income from land use rights transfer (before real estate taxes and charges) amounted to 42 per cent of Chongqing’s overall public financial and government fund revenues; as for other major localities such as Tianjin and Sichuan, the ratios were 32 and 35 per cent respectively (Ministry of Finance 2013).

[6] Based on the China Household Finance Survey, compiled by the Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (2014, 1).

[7] The developer would start advertising a few weeks prior to the opening of property sales but, in reality, when the market is hot, a large portion of the offers would have been allocated internally to related parties, thus allowing only a small quantity of supply to be available for open sales. Moreover, many of the projects on offer are still under construction, so prospective buyers can base their decisions only on the layout design plan.