Residential space and collective interest formation in Beijing's housing disputes

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 184, 2005, Pages 934-951

  Tomba, Luigi ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNITY STRUCTURE; HOUSING; OWNERSHIP; PROPERTY MARKET;

ASIA; BEIJING [CHINA]; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 30944469813     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741005000573     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Scot Tanner recently provided police statistics that signal an increase in public demonstrations from 8,700 in 1993 to over 40,000 in 2000. See "China rethinks unrest," The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 137-156. Different forms of societal mobilization, conflicts over resources and resistance have characterized urban and rural areas in recent years.
2. See the second edition of Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (eds.) Chinese Society. Change, Conflicts and Resistance (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).
3. Zhongguo falü nianjian (China Law Yearbook) (Beijing: Zhongguo falü nianjian chubanshe, 1998 and 2001).
4. "Xiaoxie tishi: Goufang bu gai tashang "shangxin zhilü" ("Consumers' association points out: Buying a house should not become a heart-breaking journey"), in Beijing chenbao (Beijing Morning News), 8 March 2002.
5. During my fieldwork I took residence in the compounds and was allowed access to homeowners' activities, collecting 50 open-ended interviews with residents, local officials and activists. I also collected flyers, documents and internet postings for the same neighbourhoods over a longer period.
6. Ira Katznelson, City Trenches. Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 19.
7. Clarence Y.H Lo, "Communities of challengers in social movement theory," in Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
8. The reform of neighbourhood institutions has taken different forms in different localities. In general however, community committees include larger portions of the urban territory than the earlier neighbourhood committees and have taken over some of the administrative tasks traditionally in the hands of work units.
9. The topic of administrative complexity is outside the scope of this article. See Benjamin Read's work, "Revitalizing the state's urban nerve tips," The China Quarterly, No. 163 (September 2000), pp.806-820 and "Democratizing the neighbourhood? New private housing and home-owner self-organization in urban China," The China Journal, No.49 (January 2003), pp. 31-60.
10. Also Robert Benewick, Irene Tong and Jude Howell, "Self-governance and community: A preliminary comparison between villagers' committees and urban community councils," China Information, Vol.18, No.1 (2004), pp. 11-28
11. Among the numerous book-length studies recently on this subject see Deng Minjie, Chuangxin shequ (Renewing Communities) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 2002).
12. Wang Bangzuo et al., Juweihui yu shequ zhili (Resident Committees and Community Governance) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2003).
13. Yu Yongyang, Shequ fazhan lun (On Community Development) (Shanghai: Huadong ligong daxue chubanshe, 2000).
14. "Framing processes" are the "conscious strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action." See the editors' "Introduction: Opportunities, mobilizing structures and framing processes - toward a synthetic, comparative perspective on social movements," in Doug McAdam, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6. While the concept appears here only marginally, I argue elsewhere that the convergence of public and private discourses on community, the "good citizen ethos" and the new consumer identities are both "frames" for collective action and ways to contain the conflicts at the level of the community, preventing them from becoming systemic.
15. See "Autonomy in the space within? A spatial perspective on governing Beijing's gated communities," paper presented at the Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Canberra, 2 July 2004.
16. David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1985).
17. See also his "Labor, capital and class struggle around the built environment in advanced capitalist society," in Kevin Cox (ed.), Urbanization and Conflict in Market Societies (London: Methuen and Co., 1978), pp. 9-37.
18. David Harvey's formulation is a "... class struggle that has its origin in the work process but that ramifies and reverberates throughout all aspects of the system of relations that capitalism establishes," ibid. p. 27.
19. John Emmeus Davies, Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighbourhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 27.
20. Ibid. p. 26.
21. John Rex and Robert Moore, Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 273.
22. Peter Saunders, "Domestic property and social class," in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 2 (1978), pp. 233-251.
23. See also his Social Theory and the Urban Question (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1981).
24. Davies, Contested Ground, pp. 44-61.
25. For a later spatial interpretation of neighbourhood conflict see Mark Purcell, "Neighbourhood activism among homeowners as a politics of space," Professional Geographer, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2001).
26. Davies, Contested Ground, p. 6.
27. David Morris and Karl Hess, Neighbourhood Power: The New Localism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), p. 1.
28. Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfiguration of Space, Power and Social Networks within China's Floating Population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
29. Dorothy Solinger Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
30. Beijing tongji nianjian (Beijing Statistical Yearbook) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 2001).
31. China Daily, 4 January 2002
32. Ministry of Construction, Guanyu Beijing zhufang er san ji shichang wenti diaocha baogao (Research Report on Beijing Secondary and Tertiary Housing Market), October 2002.
33. Luigi Tomba, "Creating an urban middle class. Social engineering in Beijing," The China Journal, No. 51 (January 2004), pp. 1-26.
34. This argument has surfaced not only in the official Chinese press but also in academic discourse on housing: See for example Li Bin, "Zhongguo zhufang gaige zhidu de fenge xing" ("The unequal nature of China's housing reform"), in Shehuixue yanjiu, No. 2 (2002).
35. Liu Jian and Niu Xiaohan tried to calculate the economic advantages enjoyed by people "within the system" as opposed to those "without the system." The real estate careers of their case-studies reveal that early buyers within the system enjoyed not only lower prices but also a much stronger appreciation of the equity of their properties: "The new middle class(es) in Peking: A case study," in China Perspectives, No. 45 (January-February 2003), pp. 4-20.
36. The impact of housing reform on social polarisation has been assessed in a number of studies: Wang Ya Ping, "Housing reform and its impact on the urban poor," in Housing Studies, Vol. 15, No. 6 (2000), pp. 845-864.
37. Wu Fulong, "Sociospatial differentiation in urban China: Evidence from Shanghai's real estate markets" in Environment and Planning A, Vol. 34 (2002), pp. 1591-1615.
38. Xiuhong Hu and David H. Kaplan, "The emergence of affluence in Beijing: residential social stratification in China's capital city," Urban Geography, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2001).
39. Si-ming Li, "Housing consumption in urban China: A comparative study of Beijing and Guangzhou," Environment and Planning A, Vol. 32, No. 6 (2000).
40. Lü Xiaobo and Elizabeth Perry (eds.), Danwei. The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).
41. The exact location and names of the neighbourhoods are omitted in order to protect the identity of informers cited in both this and other works I have done on those communities.
42. Jingji shiyong fang. This is a type of housing that is offered at discounted prices for resident families below a certain level of income (60,000 yuan per year in Beijing). The state provides the developer with the land at a very substantial discount and the developer, in exchange, sells directly to entitled families at a price lower than the market value.
43. This is slightly above the average price of the Beijing commercial housing market (4,764 yuan per square metre in 2002).
44. Beijing Statistical Yearbook, 2002.
45. As an unwritten rule well known to residents, the local paichusuo (police station) never authorizes public gatherings. Experience, however, also taught owners that police will not prevent demonstrations as long as they remain within the boundaries of the neighbourhood.
46. This specific incident was reported by both local and international press. "Yezhu: Yike zhadanAquot; ("Homeowners: a bomb"), in Xinwen zhoukan (News Weekly) 26 March 2002, and was covered by all Beijing newspapers. Among others see: "Zhuizong ### qu gaibian guihua shijian" "(Reconstructing the 'plan change' accident at ### neighbourhood"), in Beijing qingnian bao (Beijing Youth), 7 March 2002; Zhongguo qingnian bao, 20 March 2002.
47. International media also covered the story. See among others: Peter Harmsen, "Demonstrating Beijing residents scuffle with police," Agence France Press, 3 March 2002.
48. Andreas Lorenz, "Protest der Reichen" ("Protest of the rich"), Der Spiegel, 4 March 2002.
49. The title of the letter was "Appeal on the problem of the construction of Hopetown's garden and other issues," 18 March 2002.
50. Information provided by the representative of the management company during a public meeting with the owners, 17 March 2002.
51. Interview, 7 May 2002
52. "Zhongyang zai jing yi gou gongfang keyi shangshi le" ("Ex-central public houses allowed to get on the market"), in Beijing wanbao, 16 September 2003. Ex-municipal housing has been on the market since 2000.
53. Donggen Wang and Siming Li, "Housing preferences in a transitional housing system: The case of Beijing, China," The Centre for Urban and Regional Studies Occasional Paper, No. 28, Hong Kong Baptist University, December 2002.
54. The video was posted on the neighbourhood's website.
55. From a posting on the neighbourhood internet forum, 28 March 2002.
56. The re mark is assigned by the system when postings in a certain forum exceed the average number per day, and is a sign of hectic communication activity.
57. See Benjamin Read, "Democratizing the neighbourhood. New private housing and home-owner self organization in urban China," The China Journal, No. 49 (January 2003), pp. 31-60.
58. Interview, 17 September 2003.
59. Interview with the chairman of the owners' committee.
60. There was no mention of such a norm in the original regulation that established management committees (the formal name of owners' committees, a much more popular denomination among residents). Also the xiaoquban is required to approve the elected committees within ten days from the application. Guanyu kaizhang zujian juzhu xiaoqu wuye guanli weiyuanhui shidian gongzuo de tongzhi (Communiqué on the Experimental Work to Establish Neighbourhood Management Committees) Beijing Land and Housing Administration Ordinance No. 485, 1997.
61. "Wuye guanli tiaoli" ("Regulations on realty management"), approved by the State Council on 8 June 2003, effective as of 1 September 2003.
62. The document is dated 24 February.
63. Record of owners meeting, 20 September 2003.
64. Interview, 18 May 2002.