political economy, gender studies, and science and technology studies.
She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market, and shared the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Anxious Homes at the Cornell University Press website.…Yanlin’s house is a two-story construction, and she has been waiting for years for the government to demolish it. People in Sky Realty Group sometimes teased her: “Come on, we know that you married because you thought they (her in-laws) would be chaiqian hu.”The passage on page 99 accurately captures the anxiety ordinary Chinese people experienced as they grappled with the country’s fast pace of urbanization and the windfall of wealth coming through the real estate market in this process. The book is an anthropological monograph about the everyday making of a housing market at East Nanjing’s urbanizing frontier, shown through ethnographic stories about how brokers, buyers, and developers assemble the local market from 2012 to 2015, during which time China’s real estate economy experienced the fastest growth. The book asks what made people embrace homeownership and housing financialization, apart from their desire for wealth accumulation.
“Shut your mouth or I will show you how to,” Yanlin replied. “We are living perfectly fine in our house.” In the past ten years, generous compensation policies had fashioned the status of chaiqian hu as a synonym for overnight riches in the Qilin neighborhood. Yet Yanlin’s family was not yet a chaiqian hu. The 2001 construction of Eastern Town stopped eight hundred meters to the left of her house. The 2006 road construction missed them by five hundred meters. Now the house stands, with some other unlucky neighbors, among high-rise buildings and wide paved roads.
In particular, the book examines a vernacular concept called “inflexible demand/gangxu” that local actors draw on to refer to, and construct, a non- negotiable need for homeownership. Inflexible demand originally appeared as a shorthand for the microeconomic concept of inelastic demand. In everyday language in contemporary China, however, people use the concept to express a rightful demand of a home of one’s own. The newlyweds, for example, claim to inflexibly demand a home so they can start a family; developers built relatively cheaper housing to target buyers with an “inflexible demand” for homes; and the government regulates the market in the name of protecting ordinary citizens’ inflexible housing need. Resettled families, such as the ones depicted on page 99, could often expect to receive properties as compensation in urban expansion plans. The government gave such compensation to meet resettled families’ housing needs. However, in a time when rising property values drastically widened the gap in wealth between urban homeowners and the rest of the population, such compensation brought wide dreams of riches as well as anxiety over the value of one’s home.
The book argues that China’s real estate economy was able to extract enormous wealth from its urbanizing population through the popular discourse that frames homeownership as an inflexible demand. The concept also strongly shapes how people view private homeownership in China. Grounded in ethnography, the book argues that homeownership does not suggest independence, but rather, a fuller inclusion of citizens within the developmental state. In the popular narrative, the home emerges as the original source of value and an inalienable possession that collapses the distinction between use value and exchange value.
--Marshal Zeringue









