Li MaocaiFootnote 1 bought his first apartment in early 2011, soon after he had returned to China from Cambodia. “My girlfriend talked me into buying the flat,” he told me. The couple had walked into a sales office one afternoon. The estate agency adjoined a residential compound under construction in the third ring of Shenyang, Liaoning. The female agent had talked a lot, Li recalled, showing artists' impressions of how the compound would come to look, pointing out the gardens, the pond and the primary school. “My girlfriend got excited by her words.” They booked a unit, an 80-square-metre apartment for 350,000 yuan,Footnote 2 with a down payment of 150,000 yuan. “I did not want to buy the flat, but my girlfriend is from a well-off family. I had no other choice.” Li Maocai not only had to meet the expectations of his girlfriend but also those of his future parents-in-law. A few months later, the couple got married. However, Li's wife did not move to Shenyang, but to Baicheng 白城, Jilin province, where her father had bought a second apartment for the newlyweds. Li found a teaching job at a college in Baicheng with an income of 1,600 yuan per month and moved in with his wife. “But I could not cope on that salary.” When Li was offered the opportunity to go abroad again for a five-fold increase in salary, he did not hesitate, despite his wife's disapproval. In Ethiopia, I asked him why he had left China again. He replied that, “my house needs money.”
Most of Li's colleagues had gone to Ethiopia for similar reasons. Nobody made a secret out of the fact that a better salary had lured them abroad. Typically, it was real estate that “needed money.” A migrant would either spend the first year's salary on a down payment for a new apartment in a city or else save it with a parent for a house purchase in the near future. Fang Lei, who worked for the same road construction company as Li Maocai, introduced me to the concept of fangnu 房奴 (mortgage slave), confessing, slightly embarrassed, that he belonged to that category as well. Having just bought a second apartment in Yinchuan 银川, Ningxia province, he was compelled to stay in Ethiopia for another year in order “to fix the mortgage problem” (ba fangdai de wenti jiejue le 把房贷的问题解决了).
These men had become migrants in order to earn the money to repay their mortgages. For them, renting was not an option; neither was postponing buying a house. In this paper, I explore the concept of the fangnu. I attempt to explain why Chinese men from the countryside are driven to migrate to places such as Ethiopia in order to pay off their mortgages. The fangnu is the child of present-day Chinese society, which is characterized by high social mobility (up and down), as well as a growing demographic imbalance owing to the one-child policy. In this social context, a house (or in urban China, usually an apartment in a high-rise building) is increasingly perceived as a marker of status, especially when competing on the marriage market. Although bride-price payments are no longer demanded in modern Chinese society, the so-called hunfang 婚房 (marriage house) has become the norm in the cities. Young men are expected to own residential property before they marry. However, a house purchase imposes considerable pressure on those born and raised in the countryside. Unable to rely on the financial support of their kin, temporary migration is a way to cope with these socio-economic pressures when settling in the city.
This article is based on field research conducted between August 2011 and September 2012 in Ethiopia, where I followed two road-building projects in Addis Ababa and south-eastern Tigray (North Ethiopia). Both projects were carried out by Chinese contractors. The Chinese migrants I interviewed worked in various posts, ranging from administrative personnel to designers, and from contract engineers to site managers. They were employed by both state-owned and private Chinese companies.Footnote 3 Chinese contractors in the Ethiopian construction sector typically worked with an all-expatriate management, which included foremen on the building site. The number of Chinese nationals employed on road projects varied. Depending on the size of the project and the number of Chinese subcontractors involved, road construction projects commonly counted between 60 and 130 Chinese employees.Footnote 4 My respondents were predominantly men, with a median age of 29. They owned 1.3 houses (per head) on average in a Chinese city. The majority had purchased their real estate property after migration.
This article begins with a sketch of the fangnu as he (or she) appears in popular media and academic literature in China. In order to understand why the purchase of real estate property has become so central to the lives of young adults, I explore the shifting meanings of housing in Chinese society. I continue by linking the present housing rush that is sweeping urban China to overseas migration. By depicting the social context within which the fangnu appeared, I explain how owning a house has come to be seen as a marker of status and essential to finding a spouse. I then turn to the migrants themselves. By looking at their backgrounds and social positions, I examine why they choose to “migrate for their mortgages.”
Mortgage Slaves
Scornfully referred to as the people who “labour for the bank” (gei yinhang dagong 给银行打工),Footnote 5 the fangnu is portrayed in China as a modern type of slave. Unable to afford a car, a fangnu travels around the city on public transport, occupying a mere square metre of work space in an office building shared with many others who suffer a similar fate.Footnote 6 Called “the people who eat their lunch out of lunch boxes” (zhongwu chi hefan de ren 中午吃盒饭的人),Footnote 7 fangnu live frugal lives in a society that encourages more and more luxury and self-indulgence. The word “fangnu” first appeared in the Chinese media in 2006. Describing a very recognizable phenomenon, it was promptly taken up in public discourse. Fangnu, literally meaning “house slave,” is commonly translated as “mortgage slave(s)” to avoid confusion with the traditional meaning of a slave working in a slave owner's house. As I am describing the fangnu as he (or she) appears in China, I leave the word untranslated. “We have the freedom to buy a house, and we have the right to rent a house,” writes Liu Haiming 刘海明,Footnote 8 stressing the voluntary nature of being and becoming a slave to one's mortgage. Fangnu choose to give up their freedom to the bank for the purchase of a desired commodity. As a result, they cannot live the middle class lifestyle to which they aspire, despite achieving middle class status by owning their own property. Instead, they are punished for having purchased something they actually cannot afford.
Fangnu are described in popular and academic accounts as being between 22 and 35 years old, educated white-collar employees with meagre starters' incomes.Footnote 9 They live in the cityFootnote 10 and commonly rely on the financial support of their parents to cover the costs of the deposit on the purchase of a flat or house, and its remodelling expenditures.Footnote 11 Despite parental help, fangnu are subject to the constant pressure of the monthly repayments on their mortgages, which can account for more than 50 per cent of their income.Footnote 12 Fangnu gender is largely left undiscussed. It appears that men are more likely to become enslaved by their mortgages, as they come under pressure to buy a house at a young age to enhance their marriage prospects. (I use the male pronoun hereafter.) The debate on fangnu intensified in 2010, when the economic blue book (jingji lanpi shu 经济蓝皮书) announced that 85 per cent of Chinese households in fact cannot afford to buy a house, but nevertheless do so.Footnote 13 A study found that about 80 per cent of fangnu come from the “poor second generation” (qiong'erdai 穷二代), that is to say, they are the children of urban families that have not benefited from the economic reforms of the 1980s, and have a vulnerable social status.Footnote 14 Being born and raised in the countryside, my informants belong to a different category, but they can still be described as fangnu. Coming from a rural background, their social position is not clearly defined and does not fit well into the persisting rural–urban divide in China. A house (or a second house in the city) acts as “a second identity card of urban dwellers” that confirms their urban status.Footnote 15 Being able to buy a house and acquire an urban hukou 户口 (household registration) gave my respondents a feeling of accomplishment, especially vis-à-vis their parents who in most cases still lived in the countryside. It also offered them a sense of security, which they had hitherto lacked. Driven further by the need to distinguish themselves and for a sense of security, many opted to buy a second property. As a result, migration became a way of life.Footnote 16
The rise of the fangnu phenomenon has been widely discussed in the Chinese media and academia. Currently, four explanations prevail. The first links the creation of the fangnu and their conduct to the surge in house prices in China, arguing that growing prices and interest rates on mortgages have led to fangnu and increased serious debts. However, I believe that growing house prices are not responsible for the creation of the fangnu, but do make the fangnu work harder. A second explanation suggests that the value and significance of owning a house can be traced back to traditional Chinese society. The impetus to secure a permanent home before going on with one's pursuits (anshenliming 安身立命) is seen as a primordial drive innate to Chinese culture.Footnote 17 However, this approach does not explain why the phenomenon has become so widespread in recent years. According to a third explanation, fangnu are in fact not in search of a house but rather a feeling of security.Footnote 18 Security is understood in the psychological and the social sense – to find emotional rest as well as to create a safety net in case of unexpected financial adversity. The fourth explanation connects the rise of the fangnu phenomenon to the increased importance of house ownership as a symbol of status and success, used in particular to judge a potential spouse and, to a lesser degree, an employee or business partner.Footnote 19 For the remainder of this paper, I focus on this last explanation. I argue that the importance attached to a house by individuals and society explains the growing demand to buy a property, and results in the pressure to migrate for those who cannot afford to do so.
Migration and Housing
Temporary migration with Chinese state-owned or private companies offers young Chinese from a rural background the opportunity to earn what is described as their “first barrel of gold” (di yi tong jin 第一桶金). With this starting capital they are able to buy a flat and at the same time gain the freedom to do what they actually want to do upon their return to China. Migration is a way to (at least temporarily) relieve the socio-economic pressure reinforced by a rural background. Having lived for an average of 3.4 years in Ethiopia, most of my respondents planned to spend five to seven years working abroad in total. Years were typically counted as the time needed to repay a mortgage loan. Staff members of the main contractors in road construction in Ethiopia, chiefly large Chinese state-owned enterprises, earned US$1,500–1,900 (receiving 70 per cent in US dollars and 30 per cent in yuan). Employees of subcontractors earned less, between 5,000 and 8,000 yuan; this was still significantly more than those in similar positions in China.Footnote 20 Li Maocai made 2,000 yuan per month in the highway design office in Shenyang. In Ethiopia, he earned 11,000 yuan plus 2,000 ETB pocket money per month. The crux was that migrants had hardly any expenses. “In China I would have spent half of my salary on social activities alone, not to mention living costs,” explained Tang Boguang. “Here there is nothing to spend money on.” Commonly, the Chinese migrants saved part of their pocket money and bonus (also received in the local currency) to change into yuan on the black market in Addis Ababa before flying back to China for the holidays. Apart from presents for relatives and friends, such as leather items, pure honey, instant coffee or black wooden sculptures, migrants did not normally bring home goods. Remittances from Ethiopia mainly consisted of cash flows, of which the main part was spent on, or was intended for, housing. The purchase of residential property was the most urgent factor behind their migration. Other motivations, such as earning money for the education of the next generation or for a more comfortable life in the future, were less clearly defined. Migrants sometimes gave cash gifts to their parents during the holidays in China, but only a few of them supported their families financially throughout the year. Most of the migrants' parents living in the countryside were able to make ends meet or refused to touch their child's income.
Worldwide, a large part of migrant remittances home has gone towards buying housing. In China, this is and has been true for both internal (e.g. rural-to-urban)Footnote 21 and overseas migration.Footnote 22 The question of why migrants build or buy houses in their country of origin, even when they do not plan to return, has led to a number of studies that have explored the link between migration and housing.Footnote 23 By constructing a house in their hometowns, migrants forge ties with their families during periods of residence abroad.Footnote 24 Migrant houses are “relational places”Footnote 25 in the material as well as in the symbolic sense: a house provides a living space at home for holiday visits and it functions as a “proxy presence” in the community of origin.Footnote 26 Real estate property also improves the socio-economic position of the owner and demands respect or arouses envy.Footnote 27 The fancy American-style guest mansions in rural Fujian owned by overseas migrants have, for instance, been an inspiration for others to consider migration.Footnote 28 Migrant houses play a vital role in the social imagination of those left behind and contribute to the creation of a “culture of migration” – an environment in which the majority of residents aspire to migrate and in which staying behind is stigmatized as a failure.Footnote 29
However, my respondents did not intend to build or buy a house in their village or town of origin. On the contrary, they sought to discard their rural backgrounds by purchasing real estate in the city. Homeownership in itself, rather than a house as a material entity (an apartment in a high-rise building in the city is not as visible as a mansion in a rural community), was seen as a symbol of a successful migrant, and demanded respect from family and friends. In contrast to existing studies, I approach the link between housing and migration as causal.Footnote 30 My respondents migrated because they aspired to buy real estate property. Housing was the primary motivation to take up work overseas. In contrast to the importance attached to the annual income needed to repay mortgages, the location of the work overseas was of secondary importance. Migrants said they went where their companies needed them – in this case, to Africa, where Chinese enterprises are short of employees to manage the growing number of road projects.Footnote 31 From the employers' point of view, young men from rural backgrounds made ideal employees. In contrast to urbanites, they knew how to bear hardships and worked hard (chiku nailao 吃苦耐劳) and, shouldering the burden of a mortgage alone, they tended to stay for a much longer period of time.
However, in exchange for the higher salary, migrants had to work and live in harsh conditions which were associated with a slave existence. Han Xing assured me: “If they had not offered us a higher income, none of us would have come to Africa.” Migrants frequently complained about the limited opportunities to buy things (owing to the local environment rather than self-imposed financial constraints), which made life dull and therefore tough. As Cui Binhai put it: “There are no socks to put on, no clothes to wear, no drinks to drink, no food to eat, no things to buy.” Tang Boguang uttered: “It is like prison. Look around, only trees and mountains. You might consider it a beautiful view. After three years, I don't like it anymore.”Footnote 32 He lived in a compound surrounded by teff and maize fields, enclosed by a fence of barbed wire and cactus plants. Owing to their physical isolation (from the city) and lack of free time, migrants felt restricted in mobility. Moreover, they were removed from their social context in China and missed their families. Nonetheless, migrants stayed sometimes for four, five or six years. In order to understand why young adults are willing to make such sacrifices, the next section explores the importance of housing in present-day China.
The Shifting Meanings of Housing in China
During the Mao era, housing was a welfare benefit (fuli 福利) allocated by work units and municipal housing bureaus. It mostly took the form of apartments in multi-story buildings developed by work units, traditional low-rise houses managed by local housing authorities and workers' villages jointly constructed by local governments and work units.Footnote 33 The financing of new housing depended on state budget allocations,Footnote 34 and access to housing was based on necessity, connections, administrative rank (depending on position and years of service) and political loyalty.Footnote 35 Rents were low, taking up a mere 2 to 3 per cent of the household's income.Footnote 36 To alleviate the housing shortage and stimulate housing investment, the Chinese government embarked on a reform programme in the 1980s. Reform policies were accompanied by pilot schemes and aimed at the gradual commercialization of housing through the stepwise adjustment of rents, the subsidized sale of public housing and the construction of commodity housing to be sold on the market. To encourage homeownership among ordinary households with a medium income, affordable housing was developed in addition to commodity housing for upper-income households.Footnote 37 The introduction of a legal mortgage framework for individual lenders in 1998 and the abolition of the policy on the provision of welfare housing in the same year are seen as a turning point in the housing reform.Footnote 38 Housing became an object of consumption.Footnote 39
Fang Lei was one of the older Chinese engineers I interviewed in Ethiopia. Although he fell outside the typical age category for a fangnu, he described himself as being “enslaved.” When Fang married in 1995, he did not have housing. He and his wife moved into his father's house in their hometown, Bayan Hot 巴彦浩特, Inner Mongolia. Fang recalled: “[In 1995] the social morals of society were already moving towards xiao pin bu xiao chang 笑贫不笑娼 [literally, despising poverty but not prostitution] … In ancient China, you were despised as a prostitute. But from the 1990s onwards, even this view changed. As long as you earned money, everybody admired you.” The average price of commodity housing in 1996 was 1,667 yuan per square metre. A flat of 60 square metres would cost a typical household 6.5 years of income.Footnote 40 However, in 1996, it was still rare to borrow money from banks. Commodity housing remained unaffordable, but not less desirable, for a significant portion of the Chinese population. In 1998, the People's Bank of China set the legal framework that enabled qualified individuals to apply for residential mortgages, and mortgage lending began to take off.Footnote 41 When Fang Lei bought his first flat in 2000, he relied on personal savings and money borrowed from kin and friends. This continues to be a way of supplementing mortgage loans in China.Footnote 42 He considered the price of his flat, 60,000 yuan, fair: “Our salaries were low, but house prices were reasonable relative to our income. This is different now.”
Between 2003 and 2007, house prices in China went up on average by 14 per cent per year.Footnote 43 The apartment Fang bought in Yinchuan in February 2012 cost him 400,000 yuan, five times the value of his first flat. For this purchase, he relied entirely on his personal savings and a ten-year mortgage loan. He decided against borrowing from kin and friends, which reflects a trend among younger migrants. In recent years, more and more Chinese have turned to commodity housing. The younger generation, especially those from the countryside, do not benefit from the housing welfare system and must buy houses at the market price. Owing to commercialization, income rather than political background has come to determine access to housing, or its lack. On the face of it, the supply of housing in the cities is no longer determined by demand, as in the pre-reform period, but controlled by land supplies approved by local governments and the financial strategies of real estate developers. However, the state, in coalition with developers, still has a major hand in the market and steers house prices.Footnote 44
Many young Chinese were convinced that house prices would continue to rise and regarded buying a flat as, in the words of Fang, a “suitable investment” (heshi de touzi 合适的投资). In China, there are few financial instruments which allow people to protect their savings against inflation. Bank deposits yield low returns.Footnote 45 Putting money in a house is a popular and lucrative form of investment in the light of rising house prices: “If I put my money in the bank it will depreciate. At the same time, prices, of food for instance, go up … Therefore, we have to find a way to earn money from our savings. I think buying a house or a second house is a very acceptable way of doing that.” According to a survey conducted in Nanjing in 2005,Footnote 46 commodity housing was seen as the most popular investment for those in the age category of 26 to 35, which more or less overlaps with the age of the typical fangnu. Among Chinese between 36 and 45 years of age, inherited private property is the most common form of homeownership, whereas people over 46 commonly live in privatized public housing.
The Housing Rush
More than 80 per cent of Chinese homes are privately owned.Footnote 47 As early as 2006, China's percentage of homeownership exceeded that of the United States and the United Kingdom.Footnote 48 In the growing competition based on wealth, a house is a sought-after commodity. A tangible and visible marker (in contrast to a bank deposit or cash under the mattress), it has become an expression of status aspiration.Footnote 49 Commodities, and in particular durable goods such as real estate property, are used as markers in classifying categoriesFootnote 50 and distinction.Footnote 51 Society implicitly knows and agrees upon the socio-cultural value of, for example, house ownership, and class distinctions and social relationships are drawn accordingly. The spike in house prices, accompanied by the growing importance of residential property as a symbol of status, provides the backdrop of a housing rush in China. Fang Lei explained the house rush as a shehui fengqi 社会风气 (social morals):
In ancient China there was an emperor who liked to play with crickets. Soon after, everyone started to play with crickets … The whole country gained an interest in the play. It became a thriving business. In ancient times, there was also an emperor who liked to play with chickens. After some time, everyone was keen on playing with chickens. There were also a few emperors who enjoyed going hunting. In a short while, hunting became a very popular activity in the country. When an emperor gets keen on something, the commoners follow … In the Song dynasty there was an emperor called Song Huizhong. He was a painter. He liked painting. In that dynasty, everyone wanted to become a painter … Although today's China is ruled by a party, [the party] is in essence the emperor. The people cannot control (zuoyou bu liao 左右不了) him. And when our emperor starts to buy houses and cars, and takes trips to Europe, the commoners follow.
Two characteristics of social behaviour linked to status competition can be drawn from Fang's description. First, the imitation of those higher up the social ladder, and second, the imitation of those in proximity. Value standards are pinned down by moral evaluations of both those higher than you and those “equal” to you. This process causes imitation. If the purchase of houses and cars is commonly valued as an achievement or as an indication of power, these goods then become a symbol of status and assume a socio-cultural value. The image depicted by Fang is true for his own situation.
The case of Gu Hongyang, project manager of the road construction project Fang worked on, provides a telling example. On the first occasion we met, Gu informed me about the number of houses he owned and where his property was located, passionately relating how he had recently bought an apartment in Weihai 威海, a coastal city in his home province of Shandong. Despite the fact that he disliked living in Beijing, he nonetheless owned two apartments in the capital. He proudly told me that he had purchased the second apartment, worth 1.4 million yuan, without a mortgage. Gu made no secret of the total value of his property: 6 million yuan. However, even Gu had come to Ethiopia as fangnu. After having bought an apartment in Xiamen in 1998, where he worked at the time, his employer offered him the opportunity to go to Africa for a higher salary. It was a welcome opportunity to earn money to pay off his debts.
Young migrants bemoaned the social pressure they had felt when “entering society” after graduation. As Zhou Deyi put it, “As soon as we enter society we have to face buying a house, finding a wife, getting married and all these kind of problems.” The pressure derived mainly from those in proximity and their “equals” on the social ladder – classmates, friends, colleagues – who all started buying apartments after securing a job. According to Douglas and Isherwood, “each member of the population who becomes an owner reduces the number of susceptible non-owners in a circle of friends.”Footnote 52 People generally buy the things that they observe their friends and colleagues to be enjoying. At work and during free time, housing was a major topic of conversation among the migrants in Ethiopia. They knew about their co-workers' properties in China, despite never having seen them. If they did not discuss work or women, they chatted about their newly acquired apartments, the purchase of a second property, or the villa surrounded by a flower garden that they dreamt of owning in China in the future. Apart from identifying the owner as belonging to a particular group, residential property also indicated distinction, especially in respect of its location. A flat in Beijing, for instance, was of higher financial and social value than an apartment in Shenyang. A similar distinction existed among properties in rural versus urban China. For the migrants in Ethiopia, purchasing a house in a city reflected upward social mobility.
Social Background
Peng Ling 彭玲 argues that a house in urban China has come to be seen as a “second identity card for urban dwellers.”Footnote 53 In the light of a persisting rural–urban divide, homeownership has come to confirm urban status. Chiefly determined by wealth, status is in flux. Li Zhang has shown that social classes in China are still emerging after a long period of time during which social status was defined according to the different criteria of political loyalty and connections.Footnote 54 Income and wealth have now largely come to define status. Coming from a rural background, the migrants in Ethiopia could not rely on the financial support of kin, nor did they have extensive social networks in the city. “My parents already spent their savings on my university education,” explained Li Maocai. The year he went to university in Chengdu to study civil engineering, Li's parents left their farmland close to Da'an 大安 city in Jilin to an uncle and moved in with Li's elder sister and her husband in Shandong. His mother cared for her grand-daughter, while Li's father joined the cutlery and glass workshop in which his daughter and son-in-law worked. In spite of the seemingly hasty purchase of his apartment in Shenyang, Li had considered the purchase of the property carefully. He decided against borrowing money from kin and friends. Li had “married up:” his wife was the daughter of the director of a food processing company, and buying a house was essential to nurturing good relations with his parents-in-law. But now that the apartment had served this purpose, Li was already pondering when would be the best time to sell it, as his father-in-law had bought the couple a second apartment after their marriage.
Parental contributions to house purchases are commonplace in urban China.Footnote 55 Most migrants, however, relied solely upon mortgage loans from the bank. The percentage of income spent on repayments varied widely (between 10 and 50 per cent), as did the length of the mortgage term (between 10 and 30 years). Based on personal choices, these factors did not seem to correlate with the level of income. Competition in the marriage market has motivated Chinese men to pursue larger and more expensive housing.Footnote 56 For the same reason, male migrants tend to remit more of their salary home.Footnote 57 Owing to China's family planning policy, the average sex ratio at birth grew to 120 males to 100 females in 2005, compared to a normal sex ratio of 106 men to 100 women.Footnote 58 The excess of men, and thus the relative lack of marriageable women, has arguably contributed to competition on the Chinese marriage market. As high social mobility explains why a house has become a marker of status, demography accounts for the growing importance of residential property on the marriage market.
China's sex ratio imbalance is said to account for 30 to 48 per cent of the increase in house prices between 2003 and 2009.Footnote 59 In regions with a more skewed sex ratio, people pay a higher price per square metre.Footnote 60 It is, of course, hard to demonstrate such a direct causal connection, but it is interesting that the link is drawn; some of my respondents also pointed to the link. A first house purchase was almost self-evidently connected to an engagement or a marriage. “After I have bought a house, a girlfriend will cross my path naturally,” uttered single Da Feng hopefully. When asked what his employers would do upon their return to China, Solomon Tesfaye, an Ethiopian purchase manager for a Chinese firm, tellingly replied that they would “buy an apartment in Beijing and get married.” The purchase of a flat was presented to me as a necessary step that had to be taken at the right time, if possible. Men complained, yet complied with the social rules. None of my married informants had ever asked their partners to contribute financially to a house purchase before marriage. They had never considered it as a possibility. Most men put up with social expectations. If they bemoaned their fate, it was always with a sense of wit. This stood in stark contrast to the radical investment they had made to meet social expectations at home – working in Africa in conditions that were considered harsh.
Costly Brides
“In 1995, especially in the cities, a lot of men with lesser jobs had a hard time finding a wife. Society was already very materialistic. If we look at Tolstoy for instance … [one of] his classic novels tells us about two people, two young people getting caught up in a very pure and honest love. This does not exist in China anymore.” Fang Lei's pessimism is typical of his generation. Following the Tiananmen incident in 1989, Fang, a graduate in medicine nicknamed “the professor” by his colleagues in Ethiopia, was sent down (xiafang 下放) to a small hospital on the Chinese–Mongolian border. He remained an idealist, admitting: “My younger colleagues are much more realistic. They concentrate on what matters nowadays: securing a job after graduation, buying a house and getting married.” In the competition for marriage partners in China, residential property is typically seen as a marker of status.
The case of Zhang Guannan demonstrates how quickly a house purchase could follow an engagement. Zhang Guannan met his wife on the internet whilst he was working in Ethiopia. Zhang's sister-in-law introduced the young woman via QQ, the Chinese chat medium. In the spring of 2011, the two started chatting. Zhang met her for the first time when he returned to China for the annual holidays two months later. Within a month, the couple got engaged and decided to buy an apartment in Xi'an shortly before Zhang returned to Ethiopia. The repayments on the mortgage loan of 680,000 yuan would take up 30 per cent of Zhang's monthly salary for the next 30 years. When he joined the company, he had acquired a Beijing hukou, but he was quick to admit that he could not afford to buy a house in Beijing: “Perhaps I could just afford the down payment, but I would have to wait a whole life. I would have sold my house to the bank.”
If a man does not have a house when he gets married, the families of both the groom and the bride will be subject to gossip, as illustrated by Jing Fang:
If a boy wants to marry a girl, their relationship is very good, but the boy does not have a house, and the girl's family has only one child. If they marry off their daughter to a boy who has nothing, she is getting married off with nothing (kongzhe jia guo qu 空着嫁过去). Other people, for instance the people around her, will say [behind her back]: “Hey, are this girl's standards so low?” And they will say: “Why do her parents not care about her? Why do they not look after their child, letting her bear hardships with this man?”
Expectations come from both sides. Judgements are made not only by the women themselves but also by members of both families and the local community.
During the Maoist era, it was not usual to demand a bride price. Occasionally, casual demands were made; however, a house, in those days not seen as a commodity, was not among them. Instead, other goods were asked for, such as the “three rounds and one sound” (bicycle, sewing machine, wristwatch, radio) or the “thirty legs” (bed, table, chairs and other furniture).Footnote 61 During the 1960s, class lines determined by family background and kinship networks became increasingly important when choosing a marriage partner. For a man, a woman's class label and political record were most important – and according to White and Parish's study, even more important than “good looks” – when it came to choosing a marriage partner.Footnote 62 Women, on the other hand, considered that a man's job and income were the most important factors when it came to marriage, followed by his class background and political record. Men working in state factories made relatively attractive marriage partners in contrast to men working in the service sector. Factory jobs had good salaries and social benefits such as access to welfare. In rural China, the building of a house by the groom's family became a common practice only after the economic reforms. In the early 1980s, the bride's family did not usually make a special request for a house; however, ten years further on, it was expected that the groom would build a five-room house with a yard, which at the time cost between 10,000 and 15,000 yuan.Footnote 63 As a part of marriage and the life of young families in the countryside, housing gained in significance, both materially and symbolically.
Jing Fang, a human resources officer, and Zhao Yong, a contract engineer, were the only engaged Chinese couple I met in Ethiopia. Jing Fang had resigned from her job in Beijing to join her fiancé in Ethiopia for half a year before they got married. Jing's parents had expressed the wish that her boyfriend should buy a flat before they got engaged. Born and raised in rural Shandong, this put Zhao under considerable economic pressure as he could not rely on his parents' savings. Zhao had spent his first year's income, earned on a road project in Uganda, on the down payment for an apartment for his parents in Laizhou 莱州, Shandong. Zhao was “marrying up,” like many of the Chinese employed by his company. His fiancée's parents, a manager in a real estate company and a chemical analyst, came from Beijing, and Jing's salary was higher than his. Once they were married, Jing wished to live close to her parents, and so Zhao's savings from the past three years spent working in Ethiopia went on the 800,000 yuan down payment on a second-hand apartment in Beijing's Chaoyang 朝阳 district, worth a total of 1,400,000 yuan. Meanwhile, his parents, against all odds, were able to borrow from friends and family members to add to the sum. Zhao spent 50 per cent of his monthly salary of around US$ 1,500 on paying off the loan on his property.Footnote 64 Zhao's girlfriend did not contribute to the house financially. He explained: “If we buy another house after marriage, we will share the costs. But we are not married yet. According to the law we do not have any relationship, so I should bear the costs alone.” However, Zhao admitted that he had bought the flat for his fiancée: “In China, the bride's family requires the future husband to have a house. It is not a must, but it should be the case. When two people marry, they should have a house. At least, her parents hold this view. Thus, before we got engaged, we said, I will buy a house.” Jing vowed to buy a car in exchange: “If I will not buy a car, my family will contribute some money. It should be a mutual effort. We have to discuss the furniture. I think the largest part should come from my side.”
A house not only reflects wealth but also the ability and competence of its owner. Renting somebody else's property has come to represent the opposite. According to one migrant worker, Han Xing, “You already have to belong to the bottom of society before you decide on renting. This is the reality in China. Today's society gives you the impression that you only need a certain ability in order to find a way to buy a house … And, only if you are able to buy a house can you prove that you can establish a family.”Footnote 65 Renting is seen as a last resort. Whereas homeownership underwrites not only one's wealth but also one's ability, conversely, renting a house has come to indicate not just a lack of wealth but also a lack of competence, and this is particularly so for those men entering the marriage market. Housing was a gendered marker of status. By buying a house, a man can demonstrate that he can provide for a family. This was reiterated by both male and female respondents.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate why it is that young rural Chinese men migrate to Ethiopia in order to earn the money to pay off large mortgages. Unable to rely on their kin's financial support, purchasing residential property is seen as a challenge upon settling in the city. Temporary migration offers an opportunity to earn the start-up capital needed to purchase an apartment and thereby secure status as an urbanite. However, in order to achieve this, the men have to join the ranks of modern-day Chinese fangnu, not just toiling but also migrating in order to pay the bank. Young, educated, employed and ambitious, fangnu are a modern type of slave: more or less free in the choices they make, yet driven by social pressure in their decision to be and become slaves to their mortgages. Restricted in their consumption of the many luxuries present-day Chinese society has to offer by the financial burden placed on them by mortgages, fangnu struggle to live up to the lifestyle that is expected to accompany their homeowner status. In a society with high social mobility and a growing sex ratio imbalance owing to the one-child policy, a house is seen as a marker of status, particularly in reference to the marriage eligibility of a Chinese male. Although Chinese social norms do not demand a bride-price, the hunfang has become expected in urban China. In terms of the desirable qualities of a prospective marriage partner, a house has not only come to reflect wealth but also the ability and the competence of its owner: a man who is able to buy a house will be able to care and provide well for a wife and a family. Conversely, not owning a home and having to rent somebody else's property has come to indicate the opposite – not merely a lack of wealth but also the lack of desirable personal abilities. Most of the migrants I interviewed during field work used their income for the down payment on a flat in the city, or else saved it to buy a house in the near future. A few of them continued to work in Ethiopia to earn the money needed to pay off the mortgage on a second or even third property. The significantly higher salary that came with temporary migration provided the means to reduce the length of time they had to labour for the bank.
