nine - Housing policy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2022
Summary
Key issues
Over the past three decades, the nature of housing in China has transformed from being a public welfare provision to become a commodity. The property sector is now China's key economic mechanism for driving economic growth. In recent years, the Chinese government has adopted mainly macroeconomic measures to regulate the activities of the property market. This chapter focuses on the following issues:
• housing practices and their related problems before China's economic reforms;
• the process and constraints of the privatisation of public housing in urban areas;
• initiatives taken by central government to regulate the property market and meet the housing needs of different social groups;
• the development of rural housing and the needs of land-losing farmers; and
• the impact of housing reforms on the well-being of citizens.
Introduction
The Chinese government radically changed its perception of housing from a nonproductive welfare service to that of a commodity. Accordingly, various measures were adopted to stop SOEs from building and allocating accommodation for workers. Instead, workers had to satisfy their housing needs in the open market. The Chinese government has recently, however, openly admitted the limitations of the property market in addressing the housing needs of poor people. According to the Minister for Construction Wang Guangtao, the government acted to ensure the provision of housing for poor people, because ‘From our reform and explorations for more than 10 years, we have found that it's not enough to solve the problem of social inequity in housing by solely relying on the market mechanism’ (China Daily Online, 2007). The first part of this chapter gives an account of the Chinese government's efforts to privatise public housing, and the second part analyses the impact of market-oriented housing measures on the well-being of Chinese people.
Housing policy before the economic reforms
Before the economic reform era, housing in China was supplied by work units and local housing bureaux. This type of housing could be treated as ‘public housing’, because work units were state enterprises and the housing bureau was a department of the municipal government (Li, 2003, p 514). Central government and its various departments would provide ‘capital construction investment’ to work units for providing housing and other services. This production strategy could avoid delay because supportive services had already been included in the investment package (Wu, 1996).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social Policy in ChinaDevelopment and Well-being, pp. 169 - 192Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2008