Written by an anthropologist, this study examines how a highly selective set of Chinese urbanites face questions about their relation to their homes. Ho Cheuk-Yuet interviewed two categories of people. The first, to which most of the book is devoted, is people who will be displaced from their current homes by a redevelopment project. He focuses specifically on the holdouts (what he calls “nail households”), who have refused multiple offers of compensation in hopes of negotiating a better settlement. He relies on personal interviews of people in two redevelopment projects, where he became familiar with the perspectives of both the holdouts and the minor officials whose job was to make deals with them. The second category is new home buyers, and in this case he focuses on people who are explicitly buying properties for rental and/or speculation on rising prices – small-scale property entrepreneurs. Here the context is a new high-end apartment development where some homeowners perceived that the developer had reneged on the quality (and visual impressiveness) of the building entranceways.
The book's strong point is the many accounts of individuals' or families' negotiations with officials and representatives of developers. The broad outlines of this phenomenon are well known. Rather than engage in collective action to resist displacement, Chinese residents have turned to individual solutions, often best described as gaming the system. For example, family members who moved away long ago maintain their formal registration in their parents' home in order to qualify for eventual compensation when they are “forced out.” As Ho points out, people often build additions to their homes that they do not register (a tax avoidance strategy) but then try to claim compensation for that extra space when they are required to move. Their interlocutors have their own games, such as making under-the-table payments to local opinion leaders in order to induce others to accept modest compensation offers. The anecdotes recounted in this volume offer a realistic account of these practices. They reveal an interesting aspect of the Chinese governance system, where the state ultimately holds all the cards but in practice can show great flexibility at the ground level.
The protests by new home buyers (again, these are people buying for investment) are also revealing about how the system operates. Although the author is not entirely clear about the validity of their complaints, it appears that all contractual obligations were met by the developer in the case examined. This did not prevent an effort to mobilize a public complaint to create pressure for some sort of settlement. And indeed, after local officials became involved in mediation, although it seemed clear that the buyers did not have solid grounds for protest, the problem was resolved by the developer's offer to make modest changes to the entrance design.
It would be interesting to pay more attention to how these particular situations compare with more usual ones. For example, the situation of families that accepted compensation offers at an earlier point: the author could examine how and why they did this and how they perceive that choice in retrospect. Or in the property market, how do buyers respond to the ups and downs of prices, and how does that vary between people who intend to live in their apartment, those who intend to rent out for an extended period, and those who are simply looking for quick gains? What is the role of the state in these situations – in what ways does it draw people into investing and take credit or responsibility for the outcomes?
Ho makes the useful point that these cases all reflect certain kinds of expectations, especially the expectation by some residents that they could get better deals by holding out, and by property investors that they were going to make large speculative profits. I agree that some aspects of “neo-socialist property rights” are illustrated by these cases, as the book's title contends. The main “right” is indeed a new one – the right to get a share of the returns from China's post-reform real estate boom and perhaps also the right to jockey for position in the emerging system. This is quite different from the right to affordable housing that was offered to registered urban residents under socialism (not to migrants, and actually not backed up by adequate state investment in housing construction).
The author offers a different interpretation for the behaviour of nail households. In his view, they became convinced of their “needs” for more and better housing, needs that had not been met in the socialist period, needs for a separate apartment to give an adult child as a wedding present, needs for an extra bedroom, and (often) needs for extra cash payments in addition. But although public officials were aware of and sometimes sympathetic to need-based demands, they were limited by law and public policy to specific formulae for compensation, formulae that gave “rights” to people who were going to be displaced. The problem was to resolve the disparity between needs and rights.
To some extent, readers will have to decide for themselves what the theoretical implications of these cases are. The author offers a theoretical introduction, discussions of general concepts and orientations at several points within the case-study chapters, and a much broader critique of the notion of human rights in Chinese society in a final chapter. There are useful references to a considerable and diverse body of work by other scholars. However these discussions do not follow a clear line of argument or lead to general conclusions.
