Calculating Needs and Prescribing Properties: Chaiqian and the Commensuration of Value at Nanjing’s Urban Edge
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2022-08-01
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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This article examines how local governments calculate and allocate compensation to displaced peasants in demolition-relocation projects, known as chaiqian 拆迁 (demolition and relocation projects), at the urban edge of eastern Nanjing. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows that, contrary to popular imaginings, chaiqian in Nanjing do not exclude peasants from urban development but seek to exploit the uneven urban and rural property regimes and bring rural spaces, including people, real estate, and crops, into the urban system. The government-developer growth coalition, motivated by real estate–driven urban expansion, engineers this process with the aid of calculative technologies and protocols of commensuration. Moreover, technocrats such as chaiqian cadres and urban planners can never fully translate rural real estate into monetary value. They have to constantly update and negotiate protocols of calculation with property-owning villagers to solve emerging issues of commensuration. The villagers, on the other hand, engage with these technologies of valuation to raise claims to a larger share of wealth in chaiqian compensation. Demolition and relocation projects thus are not merely the execution of a developmental ideal but assemble urban accumulation as an ongoing process of value translation and transformation. They also show how urban accumulation at the edge of eastern Nanjing is a contested hegemonic process.</jats:p>
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Wang, M (2022). Calculating Needs and Prescribing Properties: Chaiqian and the Commensuration of Value at Nanjing’s Urban Edge. Positions, 30(3). pp. 501–521. 10.1215/10679847-9723698 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32441.
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Mengqi Wang
I am a cultural and economic anthropologist specialised in the study of housing and the urban environment. I completed my PhD in Anthropology at Brandeis University in 2018 and have been working as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University since then. My fields of research cover economic anthropology, political economy, human geography, and critical infrastructure studies. From 2012 to 2019, I conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork tracing the development of a low-end housing market at the urban fringe of east Nanjing, southeast China (long-term stay from 2013 to 2015, short field trips conducted in 2012 and 2019). In the field, I followed government officials, developers, real estate brokers, and homebuyers and sellers to study how diverse actors built the local housing market from the bottom up. I am particularly interested in how certain economic concepts help to bring actors together and allow for capital accumulation in the urban process.
The project produced several articles published on peer-reviewed journals such as Positions: Asia Critique, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Urban Studies. In these articles, I explored the valuation of rural estate in land assembly and resettlement projects, the temporal orchestration of home presales, and the dominant narratives that brought diverse actors together to bring the market into existence at Nanjing's urban periphery.
My ethnographic monograph, Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market (Cornell University Press 2026), argues that China’s urban accumulation has been relying on the formation of its homeownership ideologies—developed in recent decades after its housing marketization reform—that view the residential property, paradoxically, as an inalienable and indispensable possession. The book traces the circulation of the vernacular concept called “gangxu/inflexible demand” in an emerging market of housing at the urban periphery of east Nanjing from 2013 to 2015. During this time, I conducted fieldwork studying how various actors, including government officials, developers, buyers, and real estate brokers, use “gangxu/inflexible demand” to refer to—and construct—a need for the ownership of a primary home for all urban citizens. My primary interlocutors are a group of real estate brokers who specialized in selling properties to low-income families who are presumed to have an “inflexible demand” for a first home in Nanjing. Such extractive practices targeting property-less Chinese families, I argue, produce the urban periphery as both a space and a form and product of social relationships in contemporary China.
Anxious Homes challenges the conceptualization of homeownership as based solely on the exclusive access to a home. In the past two decades, urban accumulation worldwide has made homes unaffordable for most people living in big cities. Scholars from multi-disciplinary fields have advocated for an approach to push discussions of housing rights beyond the logics of privatization and exclusivity. The study of homeownership ideologies in China, where the state actively contains the development of private property rights, supplies insights for this discussion. I argue that, in urban China, homeownership does not suggest independence but, rather, a fuller inclusion of citizens within the state. Developed outside the rights-based discourse, messages conveyed by the floating signifier of “inflexible demand” are partial and amorphous, yet more inclusive and effective in evoking shared sentiments, mobilizing collective actions, and inciting responses from state authorities in post-socialist China.
I started a second project studying infrastructural breakdown and disrepair in contemporary China in fall 2023. I use multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to trace abandoned housing and real estate developments that are showing up in the ongoing crash of China’s housing market. Some abandoned constructions have become urban ruins, serving as spectres and spectacles that dramatize the impact of China’s economic downturn on social media. Some of these abandoned developments contain apartments that had already been sold in pre-sales to families who are still making mortgage payments today. This project follows various human and non-human actors, such as these homeowners, urban explorers, media bloggers, and the organisms thriving in some ruins, to explore how they make uses of the abandoned buildings. I am interested in how the ruination of the built environment, and the appropriation of the ruins expose the economic and ecological crisis of over-accumulation caused by China’s infrastructural investment; and how the haunting images of derelict buildings unsettle the process of the capitalization of land, time, and labor in China’s neoliberal development.
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