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 anthropologist based at Duke Kunshan University. My primary research interests include economic anthropology, urban anthropology, political economy, the social studies of the market, science and technology studies, housing, urban studies, and China. 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, realtors, 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 book, entitled Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market (forthcoming, Cornell University Press, 2026), analyses China's real estate economy through the lens of 刚需/gangxu, a vernacular concept that the government, developers, realtors, and lower-middle class homebuyers in China draw on to refer to—and construct—an inflexible demand for homeownership as an indispensable criterion for fulfilling dreams of urban citizenship. Through an ethnography of a low-end housing market in east Nanjing’s urban fringe, Anxious Homes shows how such claims of homeownership as an inflexible demand have helped to bring the current market for housing, and China’s ongoing real estate crisis, into existence. It explains how China’s real estate market, constructed under state ownership of land and dominated by the growth coalition between the urban government and the developer, leverages enormous resources from the population in unsustainable ways. The book also explores how resultant ideologies of homeownership allow various actors to make sense of urban growth under conditions of market socialism. It argues that, in urban China, diverse actors’ assertions of the value of the home have given rise to new forms of capitalist exploitation, citizenship entitlements, class aspirations, and gendered politics that have culminated in the formation of China’s debt-financed, infrastructure-driven growth model, whose ascendancy and collapse are felt throughout the world.
In September 2021, China’s top developer, Evergrande, made headlines worldwide for facing over $300 billion worth of financial liability. News of Evergrande’s debt problems marked the beginning of the country’s ongoing real estate crisis. As more defaults continued to emerge since then, China’s national economy slowed down, fueling discontent towards the Communist Party, and sending ripple effect throughout the world financial system. My most recent ethnographic research looks into developers' defaults. I am particularly interested in how developers' defaults halted constructions of homes that had already been sold to lower-middle class buyers, and how ruination serves as a means of accumulation in times of debt crisis. Preliminary findings from this research is scheduled to be presented at the 2023 Annual Conference of American Anthropologists in Toronto.
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