Post-Mao marketization and commercialization since the early 1980s has produced fundamental transformation of urban social landscapes. One of the most important results of the change is privatization of home ownership. Since the mid-1990s, housing privatization has become one of the central priorities in government policy, and a number of important regulations and announcements have been promulgated. As a popular government slogan put it: “Housing is no longer a welfare item; it is now a commodity!” (p. 36). With the rise of private home ownership, increasingly rights-conscious and assertive middle classes have emerged in urban China.
In Search of Paradise examines this phenomenon through an ethnography of privatizing homeownership and living in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province in southwest China. For a total of fifteen months between 2000 and 2007, Zhang studied the transformative impact of homeownership, meaning of private residential space, attendant lifestyles, and urban governing strategies in the making of middle-class individuals in today's urban China. As a native of Kunming, Zhang fully utilizes her own experience of having lived in the city, and relies on a masterful combination of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, as well as documentary research. In addition, Zhang surveys the broader national trends in urban private homeownership in order to contextualize the historically and institutionally specific experience of Kunming, and by doing so, the book presents a generalizable account of middle-class living in contemporary Chinese cities.
Zhang begins her analysis by presenting the historical background of the rise and fall of socialist welfare housing (Chapter 1), and by surveying the emergence of a powerful real estate industry in Reform-era China (Chapter 2). Chapter 3 describes the emerging landscape of living by zeroing in on the social and cultural concepts underlying the increasingly commodified housing market. Chapter 4 analyzes the intricate interplay among class, space, and consumption. Chapter 5 turns to the other side of the emerging privatized housing by offering a close look at the dispossession of inner-city dwellers through forced relocation and struggles for compensation. Chapter 6 talks about the making of new subjectivities in intimate realms of love relationships. The chapter shows that private housing plays a decisive role in shaping the personal relationships between men and women. Chapter 7 examines the newly emerging form of “governing at a distance” (p. 25) in urban local affairs. Finally, the epilogue discusses the prospects of middle classes “in search of paradise” in the context of a recent government call for building a “harmonious society.”
Three key themes run through the rich ethnographic narrative presented in the book. The first is what Zhang calls the “double movement” (pp. 10–13), which entails a dialectic between the search for privacy and seclusion through homeownership and public social activism to defend one's property. The existence of the double movement puts the urban middle classes in Kunming in a highly ambivalent position. On the one hand, they are the foremost beneficiaries of marketization and commodification of private housing, being able to enjoy their consuming power and lifestyles. On the other hand, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to powerful speculators and property developers. Moreover, Zhang shows that the double movement is “fragmented” in the sense that the social practices that form the movement are not a unitary force with abstract ideals, but are situated in specific social-class positions with concrete and often contradictory aims. For example, the self-protection activism of Kunming's middle-class homeowners is quite different from the resistance of inner-city residents who face forced relocation and demolition of their housing spaces.
The second theme is what Zhang terms “the spatialization of class” (pp. 13–16), which highlights the production of space in the form of privatized housing and community developments, and its impact on the making of China's urban middle classes. The spatialization of class is a process of making and remaking of the meaning of being middle class through the interplay of various social actors including property developers, advertisers, and the homeowners themselves, as well as people who are excluded from entitlement to those spaces. By elucidating the urban spatialization, Zhang foregrounds the importance of looking at both the production and consumption as well as cultural and economic processes of class making.
The third theme is what the author calls “postsocialist governing,” which sheds light on “how the incorporation of practices relying on the devolution of power, governing from afar, and self-governing has made possible a kind of flexible postsocialism” (p. 17). In this historically specific mode of “governmentality” (pp. 188–9), the roles of state sector and the private sector are increasingly merged, and marketized real estate developers and property management companies assume the function of governing and administrating local affairs by maintaining social order and reshaping urban dwellers into new kinds of subjects adaptive to postsocialist conditions, that is, a bricolage of selective neoliberal strategies emphasizing self-cultivation, self-control, and self-reliance.
This book is an excellent ethnography of urban middle-class living in the midst of rapid transformation in China's postsocialism. The validity of Zhang's ethnography is enhanced by its frankness, her willingness to be honest about those with whom she mingled so closely in her hometown. Zhang does not obscure, excuse, rationalize, romanticize, or patronize. Especially given the difficulty in gaining access to the lives of middle-class people, who prefer the privacy of living in gated communities, this book is an ethnography at its best. In Search of Paradise will be of interest to scholars working in Chinese market transition, class and social stratification, state-society relations, and urban studies, as well as those who are interested in empirically grounded social and cultural theories.
