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-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.  

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9781498506830

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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, 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 China's booming real estate market. -- Christina Schwenkel, University of California, Riverside

Author Information

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

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