In the Name of Welfare: Local State and Housing Welfare Expansion in Urban China

• In Event: City and Local Governance in China

Abstract

While China has been renowned for its rapid state-led urbanization, our understanding of the nature of such state intervention remains limited. Using examples from welfare housing programs in Chinese metropolises, I show that, notwithstanding radical marketization of land and housing, the last two decades saw the rise of a gigantic new housing welfare state in urban China. Why did the post-reform China steadily and rapidly expand its housing welfare state amidst the state-led process of urbanization and marketization? Drawing on field interviews, participant observation, and archival sources, I argue that housing welfare expansion should be seen as a critical dimension of the emergence of an urban corporatist coalition, an unlikely coalition between city governments and a heterogeneous set of social groups. This includes stakeholders such as local SOEs, real estate developers, SOE employees, beneficiaries of urban renewal, and highly-skilled migrants. To justify their selective exercise of urban welfare policy, city elites have utilized narratives of city corporatism, a paternalistic ideology that has equalized economic growth and social welfare in the name of the city. While the coalition has promoted their vision of urban development in the name of housing welfare, it has unintentionally reinforced systematic inequality along multiple dimensions. As such, China’s new housing welfare state, which was supposed to address housing shortages and rectify urban inequality, has become an integral component of urban developmental strategy. My research uses the case of China to highlight the multifaceted role of state in the political economy of cities especially in developing countries.

Author

• Nanxi Zeng, Johns Hopkins University