‘Rigid demand’: Economic imagination and practice in China’s urban housing market
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2018-05
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<jats:p> China’s socialist market economy is predominated by strong state-owned sectors. In the real estate market, the government further controls land and regulates social services based on property ownership. But how do ordinary market actors perceive this configuration and strategise their economic practice accordingly? Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores buyers’ and estate agents’ imagination of and practice in the housing market with a focus on the folk concept of rigid demand. Rigid demand (gangxu) refers to the belief that people have to buy a home regardless of price. Presenting how people invoke a range of referents and contexts when talking about rigid demand, I show that common Chinese market actors understand and approach the housing market not as an end in itself but as a mechanism devised and maneuvered by big market players such as the government and developers. Furthermore, actors believe that the market has a social purpose and is susceptible to agentive interventions. Ultimately, I argue that the social representation of the socialist housing market constructs and contests the legitimacy of certain economic practices and influences market performance accordingly. </jats:p>
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Wang, Mengqi (2018). ‘Rigid demand’: Economic imagination and practice in China’s urban housing market. Urban Studies, 55(7). pp. 1579–1594. 10.1177/0042098017747511 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/32442.
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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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