Housing provision structures and the changing roles of actors in urban China since 1949

Abstract

Most reviews of housing policy in China have focussed on the housing reform policies of 1979 and their consequences, and scant attention has been paid to the housing system before the reform. This is despite the fact that the welfare housing provision in the 1949–1979 period affected the housing tenure structure in ways that continued to be felt up to the late 1990s. By identifying the functions of actors within the three different housing systems that have existed since 1949, this case-based study of the city of Guangzhou explores how different degrees of government intervention affected housing outcomes. The changes that occurred over the periods were characterised by the development of the housing market and the withdrawal of government controls. The study finds that a system in which the government plays a consistently dominant role in the regulation of land use allows for the provision of affordable housing, whereas a market-oriented housing system combined with social housing supplied by the government tends to effectively improve residential environments. Consequently, different degrees of government intervention may lead to different kinds of stratification in the tenure structure, determined either by individuals’ social status or their economic capability.

KEYWORDS: :

• Government intervention
• actor–network
• privatisation
• commercialisation
• Guangzhou, China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 From 1949 to 1998, public housing was funded by the national government and was constructed, owned and managed by the local governments and state-owned enterprises (Wu, 2012). Individuals had access to public housing through the payment of low rental fees and had no right of disposal.

2 The term, work unit, is a general name used to refer to entities in which urban residents work, such as government institutions, state-owned enterprises or collectives in the planning economy era and in the later reform era (Womack, 1991).