Neo-Socialist Property Rights: The Predicament of Housing Ownership in China

(Hardback)

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Neo-Socialist Property Rights: The Predicament of Housing Ownership in China examines how urban dwellers practices of acquiring and defending property rights reshape state-property-family relationality in China. Ubiquitous housing ownership has emerged together with a pervasive yet particularized rights discourse and practice in the past two decades. Ho Cheuk-Yuet considers them to be a condensation and vindication of the principles of family values and emergent neo-socialist governance. However, there are manifested and latent contradictions between rights as interests and rights as a moral principle. This book concludes that private property rights are at once enabling and disabling when understood in the light of both the rigorous pursuit of well-being in a market economy and the contestation by those who resist forced eviction or the infringement of owners rights. In this book, Ho provides rarely available ethnographic record of the encounters between evictees and evictors engaged in housing demolition and approaches the topic of urban housing ownership from the investing perspective in contrast to most anthropologists consumption-focus analysis. Neo-Socialist Property Rights links property rights practice to the broader human rights discourse as both a working hypothesis and a historical question.

Reviews

Through vivid case studies and rich theoretical interpretations, this book sheds light on the tension between a market economy of real estate and the authoritarian government in post reform China, which is a topic in need of much exploration if we want to understand the contemporary global economic system. . . . Overall, the book provides ethnographic and theoretical insights into issues of housing, resistance and struggle, local governance, and neo-socialist China. Scholars working in these fields should find the book useful in offering the latest ethnographic updates on Chinas housing issues. * City & Society *
Rich in empirical evidence and theoretical exploration, Neo-Socialist Property Rights tackles the tension created by an authoritarian government and a market economy. It sheds intriguing light on the property issue that is at the heart of Chinas growth and decay in the post-Mao era. -- Qin Shao, author of Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity
This provocative study offers a deeply human portrait of urban citizens engaged in everyday struggles over the right to housing. With theoretical sophistication and rich ethnographic observation, Ho Cheuk-Yuet reveals the paradoxes of housing privatization, and in so doing, advances a new understanding of emergent notions of property rights and debates over home ownership in Chinas booming real estate market. -- Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside

Author Bio

Ho Cheuk-Yuet is adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.