In Search of Paradise is a meticulously conducted ethnographical study on the development of gated commodity housing estates and the meaning of homeownership for China's emerging and yet precarious middle class of professionals and owners of small businesses in the city of Kunming. It draws on intensive fieldwork conducted in the summers of 2000 to 2006. Kunming is a remote yet prosperous city in the mountainous Yunnan Province in the south-western interiors of China. To the author, Kunming, the city where she grew up and where she has regularly returned to since pursuing graduate studies and then teaching in the US, is a familiar and yet also strange place. It is strange because the majority of neighbourhoods she used to know well have been demolished and redeveloped; it is also strange because state work-unit (danwei) housing compounds which used to characterize the Chinese urban scene have rapidly given way to privately built and managed commodity housing estates.
Through personal experiences and prolonged association with a variety of informants, including her parents, former classmates, friends, local government officials, developers, property agents, estate management staff, migrant construction and home-remodelling workers, as well as through site visits, day-to-day observations and casual chats with residents of individual housing compounds, the author has provided a detailed and lively account of the tremendous transformation of urban life that is taking place in Chinese cities today. In particular, the author focuses on the emerging landscapes of commodity housing estates comprising both high-rise apartments and luxurious single-detached housing or villas, where the nascent middle class congregates and considers their dream home.
To the migrant workers and other urban poor, this new paradise, of course, is beyond reach. Indeed, a substantial number of less well-to-do but long-time residents of the city have to endure forced relocation to outlying suburbs and the implied severance of social and economic ties and treasured daily routines. In Kunming the situation is more complicated than other cities because of the presence of substantial ethnic minorities, such as the Muslim Hui people. Resistance to redevelopment and negotiation for better deals take on a variety of forms and with varying degrees of success. The author contends that regardless of the outcome, the property-based coalition between corporate powers and local government serves primarily the rising middle classes: “[t]he lower-income masses are the subject of displacement (spatially and socially) and dispossession” (p. 162).
Housing commodification has resulted in the “spatialization of social class,” which helps heighten class consciousness and worsens social and spatial disparities. Within a commodity housing estate, the estate management company has performed part of the duties formerly reserved for the residents committee (juweihu), which is an arm of the (Communist) Party-state to manage local affairs and exercise social and political control. But, according to the author, this private mode of local governance supplements rather than replaces the state agencies in maintaining control at the grassroots. Worse still, violence and association with the underworld are often invoked by the managing company to intimidate the owner-residents, the very people it is meant to serve.
Yet, it may be argued that living in a gated commodity housing estate frees the residents from the continuing surveillance in a danwei compound; as such it enhances privacy, which is treasured by the prospective homebuyers. Moreover, people who have invested their life savings in home purchase are prepared to defend what they consider to be their legitimate rights. As the author points out, by 2006 half of the housing estates she surveyed had formed their own homeowners' associations (p. 199), which in theory are there to supervise the management company. Of course, homeowners' associations as a vehicle to advance citizenship rights are limited in scope, and there are signs that the state has tried to co-opt them in its community-building drive. Indeed, the author argues that what she has documented is how real estate privatization has produced a form of governance at the neighbourhood level which draws from “both authoritative and neoliberal repertoires of rules” (p. 210). Instead of achieving social harmony, this new form of governance could be a source of destabilization.
One may not totally agree with the author's highly critical stance in her assessment of the frenetic property development and wholesale privatization of living space in China. Others have depicted a somewhat brighter picture for the rights-defending (weiqun) campaigns initiated and sustained by selected homeowners' groups (see, for example, Luigi Tomba, “The creation of an urban middle class: social engineering in Beijing,” The China Journal, No. 51, 2004, pp. 1–16). Also, the author was well aware of the immense accomplishments that have been made in improving the housing lot of the typical urban dweller, irrespective of the phenomenal increase in urban population. Yet, this was largely sidelined in her treatment of residential experiences in Kunming. In conjunction to this, the author has made little, if any, reference to the quantitative literature on China's urban housing. Still, the reader will be impressed by the richness of the book's contents and the forcefulness and clarity of the author's arguments. For me, reading this nicely composed piece was a most enjoyable and rewarding learning experience. I recommend the book to all students of Chinese urbanism.
