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

by Cheuk-Yuet Ho

Overview

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-Yuetconsiders 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498506830
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	07/15/2015
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.80(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Glossary of Chinese Terms
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Introduction: From Vice to the Virtue of Owning Private Property
Chapter 2 Exit, or Evict: Re-grounding Rights in Need
Chapter 3 Bargaining Demolition: When Needs and Desires Meet
Chapter 4 Investing Citizens: Embracing Desires and Risks
Chapter 5 Affective Ownership: Situating Rights in Desires
Chapter 6 The Property Question: Meanings and Values
Chapter 7 The Real Life of Rights: A Detour from Needs and Desires to Interests
Chapter 8 Final Thoughts: The Ambivalence of Rights
Afterword Locating and Mislocating Rights in Neo-Socialist China
Appendix Research Methods
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

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 China’s growth and decay in the post-Mao era.

Qin Shao

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 China’s booming real estate market.

Christina Schwenkel

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 China’s housing issues.

City & Society