In this short but rich ethnographic account, Mengqi Wang shows how the contemporary Chinese urban home is at the heart of everyday struggles over identity, urban citizenship and household economic fortunes. The research site drives the tale and is a key reason for this book’s essential contribution to the corpus of work on contemporary urban China. Specifically, Wang bases her study in a sprawling high-rise residential complex named Eastern Town that has sprouted in Nanjing’s distant fringe. Residential developments of this sort have popped up in urban peripheries across China in recent decades, dotting rural landscapes with improbable clusters of giant towers surrounded by fields and orchards. Far from the city centre and poorly serviced by public transportation, these new apartment developments cater to the bottom rung of the housing market: low-income locals and striving migrants to the city. In these locations, Wang shows, people desperate to join China’s urban boom find opportunity to gain the smallest of toeholds in the city through the purchase of a house. By examining people in the act of securing shelter, Wang’s analysis reveals a society and economy under immense strain.

The broader context of this book is China’s land development-driven urban political economy, which has preoccupied scholars ever since the introduction of a marketized system of urban land leases in the late 1980s. As the extant literature shows, the shift to commodified leaseholds unleashed a torrent of investment and triggered a thoroughgoing transformation of Chinese society. Wang’s intervention, four decades into this urbanization drive, is narrow, original and timely.

The organizing concept informing Wang’s analysis is the notion of “inflexible demand.” Curiously, the commonplace usage of gangxu (inflexible demand) in China today is a misinterpretation of the foundational economic concept of inelastic demand. In its popular, distorted form, gangxu refers specifically to the inarguable physical and social necessity of housing. Demand for housing, in this telling, is inflexible. The implications of this broadly shared view on housing are far-reaching, as Wang shows in six tightly argued chapters arranged in two parts.

The three chapters of part one introduce the reader to China’s socialist and post-socialist systems of housing provision, the moral economies that form around housing, and the class, gender and social status anxieties triggered by the current-day imperative – the inflexible demand – to gain access to urban life via the purchase of an apartment. The discussions advanced in these chapters revisit structural economic inequalities that persist between rural and urban spheres and the differentiated citizenship that China’s land and hukou systems have created. Indeed, as Wang notes, “the inflexible demand for a home … is a demand to be included in the urban” (p. 17). Standing out in these chapters are the valuable challenges Wang levels against traditional economic accounts. In place of the latter, Wang demonstrates through poignant testimonies from her colourful cast of characters that the market is anything but a disembodied or abstract force. On the contrary, people’s engagements with the housing market reveal how buyers and sellers of homes interpret inflexible demand to entail culturally specific forms of paternalistic state action on people’s behalf and all manner of deviations and reworkings of rules and expectations within market transactions. The sum of these interactions is that the house has become a potent symbol and medium for achieving the dignity and opportunity that people understand as their birthright.

Part two examines various affective dimensions of the urban transformation of the rural periphery. Wang shows, for example, how anticipation of demolition in the urban fringe shapes economies of construction (to augment compensation) and showers wealth upon some but not others, creating intense ambivalence among winners and losers alike. In two chapters closely focused on sales brokers, we observe how sellers refine the “craft of urgency” (p. 110), driving a process that simultaneously heightens anxieties around home purchases and reinforces the cultures of inflexible demand that sustain China’s broader housing-driven economy. Across these chapters, we find that the underlying sentiment reverberating through Eastern Town among homebuyers, sellers and brokers is insecurity in the face of an unrelenting development push.

Rural migrants in China’s booming cities have drawn scholarly attention over the years. Wang’s book extends these discussions for a new era. Declining economic growth rates have led cities to dangle the prospect of an urban hukou to new migrants – but at a price. The purchase of a property can, in many places around China, facilitate a change of hukou location and, with that simple but costly step, open entirely new horizons of opportunity. This book uncovers the intricate and intimate aspects of this conjuncture, especially as the need to pool savings from multiple sources intersects with individual and collective visions of family formation and personal ambitions, all while imposing massive debt burdens. With so many people invested financially and emotionally in a house, Wang shows how small two-bedroom apartments on the gritty edge of Nanjing brim with consequence and meaning.

Despite the emotional intensity surrounding home purchases in Eastern Town and the glaring injustices that China’s second-class citizenship confers on people with “bad” hukou, Wang maintains a dispassionate stance toward her topic. Detailed portraits of her subjects, buttressed by rich quotations, show how people make sense of their predicament, navigate adverse conditions, and apportion blame and accountability for the specific struggles they face. Perhaps predictably, the brokers of Eastern Town offer the most trenchant observations of this new economy on the urban fringe, characterizing it as one enormous hustle. Their view of the housing market seems correct in light of the sector’s recent travails. Wang has done the field a tremendous service by bringing neglected voices to the fore and showing what housing means and what it does beyond the paradox of its use and exchange values. This book merits a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with the vast implications of shelter in China and elsewhere.