Housing and Welfare Regimes: Examining the Changing Role of Public Housing in China

Following decades of deep marketization, Chinese housing policy has recently revived public housing provision, stimulating debate over whether China is moving towards a more socialized approach to housing. While such a move represents a remarkable shift in the role of housing as a welfare good or service, little research has considered recent developments in housing from a welfare regime perspective. Indeed, while the salience of housing systems to welfare regimes has been widely recognized in comparative research, this link has rarely been explored in the case of China. This paper applies a welfare regime framework to the historical development of Chinese housing system, and specifically, to empirically examine recent transformations in the housing system through contrasting examples from two Chinese cities: Beijing and Chongqing. The analysis indicates the emergence of a hybrid housing system combining socialist, social-democratic and productivist elements, focused on the chimeric needs of urban populations that are balanced between indigenous city residents and urban migrants.