Abstract
The recent trend to develop rural land in western China has resulted in the large-scale relocation of villagers. It has also given rise to self-help development of housing. By examining long-established research on both formal urban development and informal village settlements, this study examines self-built housing, collective-endorsed housing and urban relocation housing in one western Chinese village. Their coexistence was made possible by ambiguities in property rights. The state–collective divide and the urban–rural dichotomy in property rights were restructured in land development, and villagers were able to use various means to take advantage of transitional, favourable deals to gain short- or long-term returns. Specifically, self-developed housing met market demands and traditional lifestyles, but witnessed a gap between de jure and de facto property rights and could not be easily formalised, whereas officially sanctioned relocation provided long-term homeownership but with ambiguous de jure property rights and failed to fully integrate villagers into urban neighbourhoods. To a lesser extent, collective endorsement added to the legitimacy of self-help development.
Introduction
The Chinese government has been cautious about developing rural farmland over the past three decades of market reforms (Yao, 2000), but recent changes have led to urban sprawl into the countryside. In particular, the new national strategy to develop western China has resulted in the formation of 3837 development zones, most of which are located on urban fringes where land has to be expropriated from peasants (Deng and Huang, 2004; Peng, 2002). As land use shifts from rural to urban, predatory authorities may force through land and housing requisition to facilitate urban construction at the cost of property rights of villagers (Gao, 2001; Ho, 2001; Ren, 2003). However, previous studies have mainly focused on the economic loss rather than the loss of living spaces. The humanitarian concerns of the relocation of villagers raised in official communications have attracted more research and policy interest. For the dispossessed villagers, residential relocation means both the redistribution of properties and the restructuring of living spaces.
Self-help development was a self-help housing strategy that contrasted with and existed outside of the realm of the official developmental control imposed when urban expansion encroached into surrounding villages (Liu et al., 2010; Wu et al., 2013; Zhang et al., 2003). Often attracted by the potential rental income, villagers constructed high-density self-developed housing, which was relatively disorganised (Wu et al., 2013). Although it rarely conformed to official ideas of modernisation and beautification, self-help development was not eradicated by land development projects. In fact, self-help development and officially sanctioned relocation have remained parallel housing strategies in recent phases of urbanisation. One question this study asks is: why have official relocation and self-help development coexisted in transitional rural settlements during rapid urbanisation?
Official relocation and self-help development in the urbanising China
Large-scale demolition and relocation has occurred in China’s strategy of urban development as a method of encouraging growth and investments. Similar to the ‘growth machine’ model in Western countries (Logan and Molotch, 1987; Molotch, 1976), the process involved governments and developers forming a coalition. In this process, poor local people were often excluded from direct engagement (Yep, 2013) and displaced from the most desirable areas (He, 2007; He and Wu, 2007). During recent urban expansion into suburban areas, China’s central leadership has placed emphasis on social harmony (Yep, 2013), and many relocations have enabled local people to return to the same area after temporarily vacating their previous homes (Wu et al., 2013). However, the forcible acquisition of homes and land by the authorities and the exclusion of local people from direct participation have continued in most rural development processes. These different aspects of officially sanctioned relocation could empower or impoverish rural communities in different ways (He et al., 2009).
Villagers have played a more direct role in self-help development and this has been the focus of previous research on informal village settlements. Instead of a coercive development process, self-help development involves a voluntary increase in the level of construction, in response to the lack of cheap housing in cities (Wu et al., 2012). Crowded and often illegal, the constructions are built by small-scale developer-owners, and these ‘semi-urbanised villages’ have led to the deterioration of living conditions, facing the threat of crackdown by higher authorities (Deng and Huang, 2004). However, many self-development projects are very ‘formal’. For example, ‘Minor Property Housing’ constructed on rural collective land can have a high quality and huge scale, sometimes reaching more than 100 six-storey apartment buildings with 50,000 residents, and can have semi-legal property right certificates issued by township and village governments (Paik and Lee, 2012). Meanwhile, government sometimes relaxed the legal density controls and compensated for the demolition of non-certified floor space, to help smooth the redevelopment process (Wu et al., 2013), which increased the profit potential attached to self-help development.
Previous studies have assumed the formal–informal dichotomy in housing development but also recognised the complicated nature of property rights, which is context-specific and depends on formal laws or informal agreements. Property rights are almost always incompletely assigned (Wu et al., 2012), and ambiguities in property rights can arise through disagreement about de jure and de facto property rights and/or a gap between de jure and de facto property rights (Lai and Lorne, 2013). In the rapid urbanisation of rural villages, the ambiguities in property rights were intensified owing to the shifting urban–rural dichotomy in different stages of housing development and created room for different housing strategies.
First, the state–collective divide has become ambiguous in the land requisition process. Unlike the state ownership of urban land, rural land is collectively owned and family-farmed. However, governments often acquire rural land based on their unequal power relationship with the rural community, and convert the required land to state-owned urban land that can be leased to developers. The named owners of rural land, such as township and village collectives, are merely informed that the decision has been made to acquire and develop their land (Yep, 2013). This creates a divergence between de jure and de facto rights, because grassroots collectives have owned land for generations and villagers have claimed customary rights in local dealings in land. Such customary rights have a root in traditional forms of landholding in imperial times, under which the settlers could obtain permanent use rights over the land which they had ‘opened up’. Although lacking ultimate ownership, people could own the ‘surface’ rather than the ‘subsoil’ of land (Palmer, 1987), which allowed ‘virtual independence’ and ‘self-management’ for the peasantry (Hayes, 1977: 52). In a form of ‘people’s land’ (mindi) (Jamieson, 1888: 65), their tenancy was not expected to be terminated arbitrarily (Freedman, 1958: 15). In contemporary China, such customary rights continued based on the collective ownership of farmland and construction land (nongcunjitijiansheyongdi).
Second, the collective–individual divide has become ambiguous in the revenue-sharing process. Under the collective nature of land ownership, villagers do not have full control over land (Yep, 2013) but limited de jure rights to construct housing. Villagers can use the rural collective land for residential purposes but cannot capitalise their assets through the sale of land or housing (Liu et al., 2010). However, villagers often choose to maximise their de facto rights by generating rents or other forms of revenues from self-developed housing. Such housing development is generally outlawed but meets the market demand from large numbers of migrants for cheaper housing (Wu et al., 2013). Under the legal framework, such profit-driven housing development violates the collective ownership of rural land and leads to the divergence between de jure and de facto property rights.
Furthermore, de jure property rights per se can be ambiguous in defining people’s share of officially sanctioned relocation housing. Owing to the fiscal decentralisation, local governments have engaged in a fierce competition for development revenues in a coalition with developers (He, 2007). They also transfer part of the revenues by providing relocation housing, but there are no clear de jure rights to define the entitlements of each individual or household who were members of a rural collective. Different parties have to work out a contract to distribute housing properties in the relocation process.
The ambiguities in property rights have far-reaching implications for the rural-to-urban transition. Rural villagers not only change their household registration status (hukou), but also face the transition of housing from self-residence to fluid forms of capital. Rather than focusing on a binary formal–informal separation between assets with complete property rights and illegal constructions, this study investigates how the coexistence of different housing strategies was made possible by ambiguities in property rights, and how they are related to income opportunities and the livelihoods of the previous village inhabitants.
Ning village: A rural community under urban expansion
The field site of this study, Ning village (pseudonyms are used for all locations and people), is located in the suburban area of Yinchuan, the provincial capital city of Ningxia province. Before the large-scale development of land, this village had 520 households with a population of 3800, and 3000 mu of farmland (1 mu = 666.7 m2), which was decollectivised in 1982. However, the yields from traditional wheat and corn farming were disappointing. Fortunately, because of the village’s proximity to the city of Yinchuan, many villages were engaged in migrant work and family businesses, such as raising livestock and taxi driving. The pre-development annual income in Ning village was around 4000 yuan (Chinese dollars) per capita, and neither village collectives nor individual households had accumulated sufficient capital to initiate any local industries.
More development opportunities emerged in the 1990s under the ‘big Yinchuan’ project, under which the city of Yinchuan expanded into surrounding villages. From 1992 to 2008, most of the land in Ning village had been gradually developed, and industrial parks, residential areas, and commercial centres had grown up. Compensation was distributed between township, village, villagers’ team and individual households. Despite these development revenues, rural collectives were gradually replaced by street offices and residential committees, and the villagers’ hukou also changed from rural to urban. As their authority and autonomy declined, rural collectives became the passive followers of these government-sponsored development projects.
The villagers’ teams did however play an important role in negotiating compensation and relocation. Ning village has ten teams, located far from each other, that were – in practice – the holders of rural land, and they had distributed and adjusted family farms rather than the weak village leadership. When different teams became involved in land development one after another, developers had to negotiate new compensation packages with respective team leaderships and the criteria varied greatly with the location and the timing of expropriation. The land price offered by developers increased from 80,000 yuan per mu in 1998 to more than 100,000 yuan in 2003, and the villagers’ share of the compensation lump sum also increased from 10,000 yuan to 30,000 yuan. The team leadership was not only expected to negotiate a better offer in the interest of the community, but was also under pressure to make the distribution of the lump sum compensation more transparent.
Villagers received resettlement housing in a sequence, decided by villagers’ teams. The newly developed housing communities, namely Harvest Squares, accommodated both original residents and new home purchasers. In the relocation process, the teams that were developed earlier waited for a longer time, creating a temporary demand for rental housing. Particularly, a new form of self-help development emerged in Team Seven. As the largest villagers’ team, with more land, population and bargaining power than other teams, it got an official permit to construct a collective housing neighbourhood called Spring Garden for its team members.
Field visits to Ning from 2002 to 2010 were part of a larger oral history project that involved several Chinese villages, and in which the author was closely involved. This study is based on in-depth interviews with local officials and 15 villager households from this time. To capture the trajectories of the housing development patterns, the study draws heavily on interviews collected during different waves of mass land requisition (such as 1999–2003, 2005–2006), the major crackdown movement (2003), the construction of Spring Garden (2003), and the redistribution of housing in Harvest Squares (2003–2008). The following sections describe the formation of different housing strategies and then examine their characteristics and how they coexist. The characteristics are coded in interviews and categorised into five aspects, listed in Table 1: cost, revenue, property rights, facilities and social interaction.
Characteristics of different housing strategies.
Formation of different housing strategies
Illegal self-built housing
As typically observed in urban villages or ‘semi-urbanised’ villages, Ning village witnessed illegal housing construction on a large scale. This type of housing investment emerged around the same time as the start of land development in 1992, and boomed around 1999–2003 when large-scale land development occurred. Because villagers lost farmland, their most important productive resource, they were ‘left with nothing’, and the only option was ‘to build housing, stay at home, waiting to get the rent’ (interview: Dong, 2003). Unlike many other urban villages that are encircled by the city (Liu et al., 2010), Ning village faced a ‘complete’ development process that would eventually take away all housing plots (zhaijidi), which ironically gave rise to the self-built housing boom, as more compensation was expected.
The relocation process also boosted the rental housing market. Before being relocated, homeless villagers received monthly ‘resettlement’ subsidies for temporary accommodation while they searched for cheap housing in neighbouring undeveloped rural settlements. Owing to its low rent and proximity to the city, Ning village also had a concentration of migrant workers from other villages who used it as a stopover while searching for urban jobs. For example, Team Seven has around 400 team members, but also accommodated about 1600 outsiders, in 2003.
Although respondents felt justified in building or redeveloping housing in their own yards and on their own housing plots, their constructions often lacked official permission and violated government density controls. As in the case of indigenous villagers in Hong Kong, who claim they have a customary right to build and develop their land (Lai and Lorne, 2013), the respondents held that they were justified to build to satisfy their housing needs. Official prohibitive measures failed to curb or eliminate such illegal constructions. The municipal and county governments initiated a crackdown in August 2003. After negotiation, most villagers retained their existing self-built housing, but gave up their ambitions to build more. By 2008, most of the village had been demolished and developed, including the majority of illegal constructions, which were converted into monetary compensation or compensated floor space.
Spring Garden
In addition to the boom of self-built housing, Ning village witnessed another form of self-help development – building a collective neighbourhood, namely Spring Garden. Similar to the Minor Property Housing developments seen in many suburban villages, local people turned to village cadres as their allies, claiming their collective right to build within the rural settlement (Paik and Lee, 2012). The development of Spring Garden, unlike that of spontaneous self-developed projects, was stimulated by a formal land development process. Villagers felt that ‘if we do not build something, we will lose everything’ (interview: Yueqing, 2006).
Spring Garden was built by Team Seven, using funds from collective farmland compensation, which was diverted from the villagers’ pockets to the public coffers. Some teams divided collective compensation between each household, but for Team Seven, collective compensation became a key political issue concerning the legitimacy of grassroots governance. During the election of the team leadership in 2001, the use of collective compensation by the previous leader was questioned. The issue of how to use the remaining part of collective compensation was raised by one of the candidates, Wei, who promised to construct a collective housing neighbourhood, and who eventually won the election. His proposal was supported by local people, who saw it as a last chance to grasp a bigger share of the development revenues from predatory governments and exploitative developers. The team effectively mobilised resources and collective wills, and the local government agreed to reserve a portion of the developed land for the construction of Spring Garden, in exchange for the team’s cooperation in the development process. This however was not the case for other teams that had divided up the collective share and for which leadership was too weak to defend local interests.
The construction was carried out in 2003, and was composed of around 100 houses, each with three storeys and a floor space of 167 m2. Rural households could buy a house for a minimum price, because collective compensation was used to cover part of the construction cost. The price gap was calculated by the previous landholding situation of each household, and each landholding person was entitled to a reduction of 15,000 yuan in the housing price. The housing cost was around 100,000 yuan per house, and a family with three landed members would get a reduction of 45,000 yuan, therefore needing to pay around 55,000 yuan. However, the land-related discount only applied to the first house purchase. If some better-off families wanted buy a second house, they needed to pay the total cost. It was nevertheless much cheaper than the market price for outsiders (interview: Xuefeng, 2003). By 2005, the market price of a house in Spring Garden had reached 250,000 yuan, which further increased to 350,000 yuan in 2010.
Compared with other teams who lost all their housing plots in the development process, Spring Garden became a haven for Team Seven, whose members could enjoy their ‘dream houses’ and their compensation (interview: Meng, 2010). Members of Team Seven were also entitled to relocation housing in exchange for their demolished houses, because, as they argued, Spring Garden was constructed using their own money and collective land. From the perspective of the other teams however, Team Seven was compensated twice.
Harvest Squares
As observed in other property-led development processes in China, Harvest Squares reflected the desire to attract a wealthier population (He, 2007) and the government’s encouragement to demonstrate economic achievement (Yep, 2013). Meanwhile, Harvest Squares was also used as resettlement housing, mostly distributed from 2003 to 2008. In Harvest Squares, most apartment units have a floor space of 80–100 m2, and during the relocation process extended families usually split up into nuclear families.
Local people could pay for extra floor space or receive more monetary compensation instead of housing, which was based on the difference in floor space between demolished and relocated housing. To pay for this difference, villagers could take advantage of the ‘relocation’ price (500 yuan/m2), instead of the market price of 1260 yuan (interview: Guanqi, 2003). However, if the extra ‘deserved’ floor space was converted into monetary compensation, the price was only 300 yuan/m2, ‘not enough to buy the same amount of housing floor space even now, not to mention in the future’ (interview: Zhao, 2006). Many villagers therefore preferred housing to monetary compensation. However, if villagers wanted to buy more housing, they needed to pay the same market price as outsiders. Some villagers managed to obtain six to eight relocation units because of their previous, spacious demolished houses, but others only obtained enough for self-residence. This added to their future financial burden, as the younger generation desired individual urban homes (interview: Jiao, 2009; Wangma, 2010).
In short, the rural-to-urban transition provided a unique context for officially sanctioned relocation and self-help development. Unlike urban residential displacement, Harvest Squares accommodated a mix of locals and middle-class home purchasers from elsewhere. Unlike spontaneous self-help development, Spring Garden and the boom in self-built housing in Ning village were stimulated by urban expansion. Their coexistence and characteristics are examined in the following section.
Mixed housing tenures
Housing cost: Favourable deals and difficult choices
The most striking finding in Ning village was that most local families have simultaneously invested in multiple housing properties. Before the land development, the prevailing housing tenure was to build self-residence on plots when an adult son was to get married, and there was little chance to capitalise housing assets. However, the land development process created a desire for more housing investments in a short period of time, as a safeguard for the future. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, almost every family in the village was engaged in constructing self-built housing, costing around 20,000 to 60,000 yuan, depending on the size and quality of the housing. Another type of housing investment emerged in 2003 for Spring Garden. To claim a single-family house, members of Team Seven needed to pay a deposit of 30,000 yuan, then a total price of 50,000–100,000 yuan, depending on their landholding situation. As for Harvest Squares, relocated villagers needed to pay for the difference in floor space at a price of 500 yuan/m2, whereas it cost around 100,000 yuan to buy a new unit.
Villagers saw such multiple investments as their last chance to take advantage of the favourable deals offered by the state, market forces and rural collectives. First, there were the favourable ‘agricultural loans’ sponsored by the state. In addition to a discounted interest rate, local people could apply for an extension (an additional three years on a three-year loan) to pay back the loan, as long as they paid off the interest. Second, villagers could enjoy the ‘relocation price’ for the difference in floor space between their demolished and relocation housing, as a special offer from the developers. In any future purchase of new apartments, they must however pay the market price. Third, some villagers were subsidised when buying a house in Spring Garden, as collective revenues covered part of the cost.
Despite these favourable deals, multiple housing investments led to heavy financial burdens. Before they were demolished, most self-developed housing could not generate enough rental income to pay off the debts (interview: Wangma, 2010), and the favourable loan policies were no longer applicable after villagers became urban residents. Although currently, most urban homeownership in Chinese cities also involves loans, relocated villagers were in a worse financial situation, because of their ambitious plans and their inability to earn enough. When the stable income generated from land was taken away, urban job opportunities for villagers were mainly temporary and low-paid. Many villagers put their work on hold, investing more in properties and waiting for the compensation. However, they had no control over when their land and housing could be converted into compensation, even though each family would eventually receive monetary compensation of 100,000–200,000 yuan. When Spring Garden was under construction, the team leadership found that the remainder of the collective compensation was less than expected, and the villagers therefore needed to pay a larger share of the housing cost. They therefore had difficulties financing all of their housing investments.
The limited earning capability and the slow payback of housing investments presented difficult choices for villagers such as Yukui, who had to give up some of his properties to pay off debts. Yukui firstly took a bank loan of 60,000 yuan to construct and renovate self-built housing from 1999 to 2003. For him, ‘building housing is a productive investment’, but ‘you need to have the courage to catch the chance’. In 2003, Yukui also paid a deposit on a house in Spring Garden, and borrowed another 70,000 yuan. In 2006, the family was assigned a unit in Harvest Squares, and the amount needed to pay for the floor space difference was the last straw. Eventually, he had to sell the house in Spring Garden, which enabled him to pay off the debts and make around 100,000 yuan profit (interview: Yukui, 2005, 2006).
This withdrawal from Spring Garden was not rare, as it was a large investment for people to make. In 2006, only 30% of the original local purchasers finished decorating and actually moved into their Spring Garden houses (interview: Yukui, 2006). In contrast, officially sanctioned relocation housing became the conservative option for most villagers, as only a relatively small amount was needed, regarding the ‘deserved’ floor space. However, some people attempted to finance all three types of housing investment; a difficult path regarding future prosperity (interview: Yueqing, 2003, 2006). It was the last chance for them to use the temporary favourable deals to firm up their ambiguous share of development revenues.
Housing revenue: Short-term or long-term return
Different housing investments generated distinct short-term or long-term revenues. The most visible revenue derived from self-help development was rent, and the first floor of self-built housing was sometimes also used for commerce. However, these rental and commercial income sources were limited to the lower end of the market, as people tended to search for cheap housing at the urban fringe. Relocated villagers only received 40 yuan per month per person for temporary accommodation, and rent for one room was 80–100 yuan, on average. Furthermore, when eventually relocated into the new urban neighbourhoods, many tenants would leave the rental house vacant. The unsustainability of rental income was also related with the fact that it was not backed up by de jure rights, which did not allow peasants to expand and capitalise their self-residence without government permission.
The unsustainable rental income resulted in many villagers wanting to have their self-built houses demolished, to get compensation (interview: Yukui, 2006). Unlike the rental income that was decided by market conditions, compensation was determined by government policies. Because much of the self-built housing was defined as illegal, it was converted into relocation housing at a low ratio, or compensated at a low price (interview: Zhugu, 2006). For example, 12 rooms of self-built housing were converted into only two apartment units in the developed area (interview: (Liyi, 2006). In some extreme cases, people were told that any extra newly built housing would not be eligible for compensation. Even for rural housing built with permission, de jure rights were vague in terms of their worth in the compensation package, which might be devalued by governments and developers. As one respondent complained, ‘the more you built, the more you lost’ (interview: Taowei, 2003).
Compared with the short-term revenue of self-built housing, the longer-term investment in Spring Garden and Harvest Squares seemed more worthwhile. Villagers in Team Seven were grateful for the investment opportunity in Spring Garden, and were envied by those from other teams, who lost all their self-developed housing after development (interview: Meng, 2010). As one respondent put it, as a valuable long-term investment, their house in Spring Garden ‘is all I can keep to secure my future’ (interview: Yueqing, 2006). Without paying the land transfer fees and without having to report their profits, Spring Garden residents were able to benefit from their collective-sponsored de facto property rights, which were temporarily out of the reach of the state regulations.
Local people also expected to benefit from the property redistribution of Harvest Squares, in the long term. The profit margin was limited however, as the private developers and the local governments made the biggest gains from relocation, rather than the original low-income residents (He et al., 2009). The relocation price was an offer limited to the difference in floor space, and there was no subsidy for new purchases, so local people earned less from buying and selling the housing units in Harvest Squares. Additionally, those who were assigned multiple housing units would rather hold on to the units, which would be needed when their children established new families (interview: Wangma, 2010). Some small, extra apartments were rented for 200 yuan per month (interview: Meng, 2006), as part of the limited income opportunities after land development.
The local people therefore had to derive various ways of maximising revenues from housing investments, either in the form of rent, compensation or sales, but such revenues were subject to market conditions, state regulations and collective support. In the transitional neighbourhoods, villagers could possess housing property in Spring Garden and Harvest Squares in a more permanent way than illegal self-built housing, and they expected longer-term rewards from the former.
Property rights: De jure and de facto rights
As discussed above, potential revenue flows from the three types of housing were constrained by the ambiguities in property rights, manifested in the phases of land requisition and revenue sharing. In the case of self-built housing, there was a gap between de jure and de facto property rights in both phases. In the land requisition period, villagers found that their land could be taken away at any time with a legal conversion of land use, and they could not resist the eventual crackdowns of rural housing. As a result, villagers were encouraged to maximise their de facto rights over their residential land as long as it was still available, and to intensify rural construction beyond their de jure rights. Regarding the revenue-sharing process, under the collective ownership of rural land, villagers could not capitalise their self-residence, but they strived to derive rental income and compensation from their informal properties. In other words, legal titles were separable from the right to generate profits from properties, and villagers used all means at their disposal to derive revenues.
The building of Spring Garden, however, did not conflict with de jure rights in the land requisition period because the land beneath it remained under the rural collective ownership as a piece of ‘reserved’ land for Team Seven. Based on government approval, the land was exempted from the massive conversion of rural land to urban land. Such an exception was negotiated in an era of the shifting urban–rural boundary and state-collective divide in property rights and was granted legitimacy by higher authorities in terms of land use. But concerning the revenue-sharing process, Spring Garden also belonged to rural housing built on collective land for self-residence purposes, while villagers sought to create extra de facto rights by capitalising their houses. Because of the gap between the insiders’ price and the market price, team members began to sell the houses for profit. Because the land beneath Spring Garden was still collectively owned, team members could only provide partial property certificates for housing sales. To some extent, such partial homeownership hindered further increases in potential house prices.
Harvest Squares illustrated another kind of ambiguities in property rights – the disagreement over de jure property rights. De jure rights can be ambiguous because of difficulties of achieving a perfect consistency in reading laws and policies (Lai and Lorne, 2013). It was not salient when the land was acquired for constructing relocation housing, but when relocation housing was distributed, there were disputes over de jure property rights villagers acquired through compensation. Villagers’ de jure rights to be compensated for their demolished housing lacked consistent explanations, and the compensation criteria were often subject to the discretion of local offices. Even for self-residence built with official permission, how it was converted into relocation housing properties was often negotiated rather than legally defined, which did not satisfy many villagers. Such ambiguities also undermined villagers’ faith in the legality of their new homeownership. Villagers had relied on customary rights and shared ‘a self-righteous consideration’ of having settled by building their own houses (Lai and Lorne, 2013: 10). For their new relocation housing, many were reluctant to pay the processing fee to get the official homeownership certificates, because ‘even without the certificate, the government could not expel us from our housing’ (interview: Meng, 2006). But such doubts may be transitional because of the temporary ambiguities of de jure rights. Some villagers also considered the official homeownership certificates necessary for any future transactions in a more established housing market (interview: LYF, 2006). Another aspect of ambiguity was the division of housing properties among family members, as many households got multiple apartments in exchange of their demolished housing. This would take a while to be resolved until families worked out a solution in legal terms (interview: Shi, 2003).
By becoming legal homeowners in Harvest Squares, local people had their de jure property rights recognised by both the state and the market, which remained somewhat ambiguous but still became a dominant housing tenure over time (interview: Jiao, 2009). In contrast, both Spring Garden and illegal self-built housing witnessed a gap between de facto and de jure rights, as villagers tended to maximise or create extra de facto rights owing to market demands and lax development regulations in the transitional period. But for Spring Garden, such a gap was attenuated by the collective endorsement in terms of land use.
Facilities: Affordability and fairness
In addition to property rights and income opportunities, local people also assessed their different housing strategies according to their ‘liveability’, particularly in terms of facilities and the physical environment. As the problem of under-development in semi-urbanised villages (Deng and Huang, 2004) indicates, most illegal housing was built to be rented and eventually to be demolished, and was characterised by low construction quality, simple decoration and basic facilities. In contrast, Harvest Squares and Spring Garden were well equipped with convenient modern facilities, such as a heating system, and were managed by property management companies or external service providers.
Many respondents pointed out the higher amenity values resulting from the modern facilities in both Spring Garden and Harvest Squares, but they complained about the consequent costs incurred (interview: Wangma, 2010). Rural self-built housing, in contrast, reflected a self-sufficient lifestyle that had existed for generations. Rural self-built housing often had separate heating systems, which only cost around 1000 yuan per year. In the apartment units, the centrally controlled heating system cost a family around 3000 yuan per year (interview: Guanqi, 2003). Air conditioning was rarely needed in rural self-residence in the summer because of the low construction density, which was not the case in Harvest Squares. As facilities and services were outsourced to market providers, living in an urban neighbourhood not only brought with it the heavy burden of management fees and maintenance costs, but also challenged their previous lifestyles. In addition to the affordability issue, many villagers expressed unwillingness to pay for an urban life that they did not ask for (interview: Zhen, 2010).
In addition to the cost, the ‘unfair treatment’ also undermined the level of satisfaction that local people felt toward the physical environment of Harvest Squares. Particularly, relocation housing was ‘constructed in a rush so we could be relocated after the demolition’, which led to inferior building quality (interview: Zhugu, 2006). Relocation was an integral part of the developers’ contracts with the municipal government while developers also had a strong profit-driven motivation to construct better commercial housing for market sales.
The management of facilities was profit-oriented and tailored toward urban middle-class purchasers. The property management company was reluctant to respond to the issues of housing and facilities’ quality raised by the villagers, such as leaks (interview: Liyi, 2006; Meng, 2010). The company argued they had no responsibility as the villagers did the decoration themselves (interview: Liyi, 2006), whereas the municipal government took a hands-off position and responded that these were market issues and thus they should not intervene (interview: Meng, 2006). Furthermore, the authority and autonomy of the rural grassroots collectives diminished and much of their ability to safeguard the interests of their fellow villagers was lost. In the urbanisation process, street offices and residential committees replaced the previous township and village organisations, which had no knowledge of previous rural community interests. From the villagers’ point of view, neither the state nor its local agency managed to regulate the greedy private companies. As a form of passive resistance, many villagers refused to pay the management fee to the property management company (interview: Liyi, 2006; Meng, 2010).
Villagers living in Spring Garden also complained about their expenses, but to a lesser extent, partly because they were not treated in an ‘unfair’ way and they had greater freedom to use facilities and services as they wished. Spring Garden provided single-family houses with small gardens, where the residents could grow vegetables. Some even drilled wells to get water, so they did not always need to use the paid-for mains water. In comparison, the use of free water was strictly prohibited in Harvest Squares to protect the commercial interests of those supplying the mains water (interview: Luo, 2010). In Spring Garden, the previous rural lifestyle was largely preserved through the collective desire to construct a local community of ‘dream houses’.
In short, the private, commercial management of facilities and services in Harvest Squares led to problems of affordability, and the hands-off position taken by the state disadvantaged low-income locals. However, sponsored by rural collectives, Spring Garden provided an upgraded living environment while retaining part of the legacy of rural community lifestyles.
Social interaction: Convenience, privacy and segregation
The social lives of the residents were important, and the effects of the housing environment were influential. The ‘convenience’ of social interaction was important for many respondents, especially the elderly, and was a reason why they preferred self-built housing to commercial housing communities. In the old village, self-built housing could provide ideal spaces for social events or family gatherings, and it was convenient to have many rooms because they ‘would need places for the wedding banquet’ (interview: Jinyi, 2003). As one respondent commented, after relocation they did not have enough space for tables, to hire people or to cook when preparing for weddings or funerals (interview: Zhao, 2006).
Spring Garden retained much of the previous characteristics of community living, as the single-family houses were designed for fellow villagers from the same team. However, this was undermined as many families with economic difficulties sold their houses to outsiders, and many worked for different employers or were engaged in different economic activities after the farmland was taken away. In other words, the common ground of social life was lost, and the daily interactions of community life became less important in economic terms. Unlike the old village with its public spaces where people could gather and socialise, Spring Garden was more private and more urban, with houses separated by paths and fences. In short, Spring Garden reflected the increasing value of privacy and the declining value of convenient social interaction, as homogeneous rural communities were transformed into heterogeneous urban neighbourhoods.
However, compared with Harvest Squares, Spring Garden still provided more room for convenient social interaction, through its open spaces and low-rise houses (interview: Lu, 2010). Consisting of high-rise buildings, Harvest Squares was more private, but preserved little of the previous community life. As described by a respondent, ‘now we only gather in front of the buildings and do not visit each other’s homes’, as ‘the homes were kept clean (and it was not appropriate to drop by)’ (interview: Zhao, 2006). Furthermore, when extended families split up and married couples moved to urban apartments, the ties within extended families were also undermined. As one respondent put it, ‘you need to climb up to the fifth floor to visit them’. He had not visited his sons for six years after their relocation because of this. He said, ‘We only took short walks downstairs, but we had nowhere to go; we were imprisoned in the forest of buildings’ (interview: Wang, 2010).
The dynamics of the housing market meant that privacy became ‘marketable’ and more important than the previous close community interactions. As more ‘strangers’ came in, distinct patterns of local–outsider relationships formed, because of their different socioeconomic entitlements and lifestyles. In the old village, locals also served as landlords and welcomed the arrival of outsiders, as they would generate rental income. In Spring Garden, outsiders who bought their way into the single-family house community at a higher cost challenged this position. The previous team collective, although no longer meaningful in administrative terms, had been responsible for the construction of Spring Garden and was still in charge of selling extra houses or reserving buildings for commercial use. In this area of community maintenance, the locals’ interests were prioritised. For locals living in Spring Garden, their immigrant neighbours were simply strangers they had to live with, in the same community.
Harvest Squares further marginalised the locals. Without the intervention of rural collectives, villagers felt they were discriminated against, compared with other homeowners. Although their hukou switched from rural to urban, they did not integrate smoothly into urban neighbourhoods as their housing changed from self-residence to capital and commercial. First, local people were assigned apartments rather than choosing to buy what they wanted, and they usually paid less than other homeowners because of the conversion of housing floor space. For developers and service providers, the low-income locals did not have the same financial capacity as other clients. Second, the lower status of relocated villagers was accentuated by their rural origin and related lifestyles. The presence of relocated villagers was perceived to bring down the ‘standing’ of the community, and some of the other homeowners regretted their home purchase for this reason (interview: Zhang, 2010).
Such market discrimination was reflected in the spatial segregation of Harvest Squares. The real estate developer built a fence in Harvest Squares to separate the relocated locals from the other homeowners. This spatial segregation was justified for security reasons, but locals still felt offended. A villager asked, ‘Is it a prison? Why were only the buildings that we lived in encircled by a fence, and not the other parts of the community housing?’ (interview: Meng, 2010). Some villagers even tried to destroy the fence, but they realised there was nothing they could do to change the perceived urban–rural divide. Regarding the fence, the only thing they could do was to attempt to ignore it, but the segregation also made it difficult to sell their apartments (interview: Wang, 2010). Other homeowners complained that they had been put in the community together with the relocated villagers, although they avoided interacting with them directly because ‘it was no good to get in touch with peasants’ (interview: Zhang, 2010).
Although there were no open conflicts between locals and outside homeowners, many relocated people reported that they felt no close attachment to the commercial housing communities. Even though the communities were described as ‘modern’ and comfortable to live in, they reflected a fragmented housing market that failed to integrate the villagers effectively. The selling points of Harvest Squares were those of amenity and privacy, driven by market dynamics, rather than the notion of convenient social interaction, as experienced in previous community life.
Discussion
This study explores the coexistence of officially sanctioned relocation and self-help development in the context of rapid urbanisation of peri-urban villages. Previous studies of urban development emphasised the role of governments and of market developers, who pursued the exchange value of land and housing at the cost of previous neighbourhoods’ everyday use value, as suggested by the growth machine model (He and Wu, 2007). Formal development often consisted of private commercial activities, in the guise of being in the public interest, which excluded residents’ participation and led to inadequate compensation, insufficient replacement housing and underdeveloped infrastructures and amenities (He, 2007). Conversely, research on informal rural settlements focused on the activity of individual developer-owners and rural collectives in maximising de facto property rights. Self-help development met the demand for cheap housing on the urban fringe and helped to boost the incomes of villagers, but the state tried to curb illegal development such as this, as it led to disorder and informality.
This study attempts to examine both official relocation and self-help development in context, by studying the parallel pathways of housing development in a western Chinese village, which included self-built housing, collective-endorsed housing and urban relocation housing. The coexistence of the state, rural collectives and market forces in rapid urbanisation suggests a necessity to examine these together. The various influences of these different parties in defining de jure and de facto property rights led to ambiguities and also chances for villagers to take advantage of temporary, favourable deals. The coexistence of various housing tenures illustrates that the formal–informal boundary of housing development is not always strictly defined. Self-help development was stimulated and tolerated by urban expansion projects, and there are different levels of informality in self-developed housing. Instead of generating disorder, some has the potential to be partially formalised and generate long-term revenues, when backed up by collective endorsement. These findings challenged the official policies of beautification and modernisation, as well as the public image of informal constructions, and the assumption that they should necessarily be demolished. With a research focus on property rights, this study provides an important interface between formal and informal development, seen in previous literature, and added to the general discussion on the economy of urbanisation.
Examining the formal–informal range within housing development types, this study explores how they can coexist by highlighting the link between macro land and housing organisations and micro housing strategies. Despite introducing a more stringent regime of land use (Paik and Lee, 2012; Yep, 2013), property rights could still be contested by the state, rural collectives and market forces. The state intended to create more governable spaces, but it also relaxed development controls from time to time (Wu et al., 2013). The grassroots rural collectives were in a subtle position, caught between following the government-sponsored course of development and defending locals’ rights of land use. The vague nature of their share in development revenues meant that villagers did whatever they could to maximise short-term or long-term returns while they could, and most of these opportunities were generated by the restructuring of the state–collective divide and the urban–rural divergence in property rights. In particular, the involvement of rural collectives allowed villagers to create innovative forms of self-help development that generated long-term revenues. At the same time, such opportunities were constrained by the transitional nature of government policies, market conditions and collective support. In short, housing strategies not only reflected the micro-level risk calculation of the villagers, but were also shaped by structural incentives and constraints.
This study also contributes to the understanding of the consequences of urbanisation on villagers. In the transition from rural self-residence to urban commercial housing, the coexistence of officially sanctioned relocation and self-help development has complex socioeconomic implications for local villagers. In particular, simply owning properties did not ensure a smooth integration into urban housing markets. Self-help development met temporary market demands and served as an opportunity to negotiate for a bigger share of development revenues and to maximise de facto rights beyond de jure rights. Self-help development also helped to retain traditional rural lifestyles, but this was difficult to formalise into the urban economy. In contrast, officially sanctioned relocation provided long-term homeownership through commercial housing, which became the dominant housing tenure because of the institutionalisation of housing markets. But its de jure rights remained ambiguous to some extent and did not satisfy many practical needs, and failed to integrate villagers effectively into urban neighbourhoods. It is hard because of this to eliminate self-help development endeavours, particularly when the gap between de jure and de facto rights was attenuated by collective endorsement. However, as urban expansion encroached into surrounding villages, rural community organisations were replaced by urban residential committees and street offices, and lost much of their authority and autonomy. Owing to the declining influence of rural collectives, as well as the institutionalisation of the housing market and the changing role of the state as a market facilitator, collective-sponsored self-help development endeavours were not likely to be replicated elsewhere.
This study demonstrates some key areas of policy development to address the relationship between development and social harmony, which has become a new basis for the party-state’s legitimacy with a moral dimension that respects traditional values. For ordinary people, the Chinese social harmony ideal is ‘stable habitation joyful work’ (anjuleye), and for the public-spirited is ‘good family for good government’ (qijiazhiguo), both using appropriate living space as a precondition. Given the parallel housing development patterns, social harmony in a number of ways depends on resolving ambiguities in property rights on land. Reforms in property regimes need to evolve together with the rapid urbanisation process, which witnesses not only the disagreement about de jure or de facto property rights, but also a gap between de jure and de facto property rights. New policies to address the related disputes and tensions are necessary to ensure sustainable growth of property markets under the new official discourse on justice and social harmony.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Professor John Logan and the anonymous referees for their valuable suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper, and Professor Yang Shanhua and the student research team at Peking University who were involved in the fieldwork.
Funding
This paper is based upon work supported by the Hong Kong Baptist University Faculty Research Grant, the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant) and Beatrice and Joseph Feinberg Memorial Fund.