Housing and Subjective Class Identification in Urban China

Abstract

Housing has become a major dimension of socioeconomic inequality in contemporary China. This study investigates the effects of homeownership and housing wealth on people’s subjective class identification in urban China. Using the data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2016, we estimate fixed-effects models and show that growth in housing wealth improves people’s perceived social status, and the improvement is greater in more economically developed areas with higher real estate prices and greater housing inequality. Owning a home enhances subjective social class only in eastern coastal regions but not in inland regions. These findings suggest that as homeownership expands and becomes universal in a society, the psychological benefits of homeownership may diminish, but the subjective impact of housing wealth would increase. The study contributes to the literature on the social consequences of housing in a transitional society that is experiencing rapid housing privatization and increased housing stratification.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for the financial support from Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council through the Collaborative Research Fund (C6011-16G). We thank the participants of the weekly seminar at the HKUST Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) for comments and suggestions.

Notes on contributors

Wei Chen

Wei Chen ([email protected]) (PhD, Shanghai University, 2016) is a post-doctoral fellow at Center for Applied Social and Economic Research, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests focus on housing inequality and social stratification. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Chinese Journal of Sociology and Journal of Social Development (in Chinese).

Xiaogang Wu

Xiaogang Wu ([email protected]) (PhD, UCLA, 2001) is chair professor of social science, the founding director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at HKUST. He is also affiliated with Division of Public Policy at HKUST. His research interests include social stratification and mobility, labor markets and economic sociology, and quantitative methodology. His previous work has appeared in Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Demography, Social Science Research, and other leading journals in area studies.

Jia Miao

Jia Miao ([email protected]) (PhD, HKUST, 2017) is a research assistant professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include neighborhood and health inequality. Her studies on neighborhood mainly focus on neighborhood effects on health outcomes and the relevant social processes. She is particularly interested in how the neighborhood physical and social environment affect the subjective well-being of the older population in mainland China and Hong Kong. Her research on health inequality centers on how socioeconomic conditions at the macro-level interact with individual attributes and then shape health trajectory of people from the diverse social background.