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COPYRIGHT 2004 The Institute Inc.
Introduction
Over the past 25 years the Chinese urban landscape has been transformed. In 1980 most of China's urban population lived in low-rise buildings or 8-storey walk-ups. In the older city districts many households shared a common cooking area and had to utilize public toilets. In Guangzhou (Canton), the city we shall be studying in more detail, average per capita living space in 1980 was a mere 3.97 square meters (Guangzhou Shi Tongji Ju 2002: 207). Interiors were bare concrete and devoid of personal touches, walls or dressers displaying at most a calendar or family photographs. Building exteriors were drab and crumbling; routine maintenance and landscaping, almost unknown. Housing was regarded primarily as a welfare benefit, acquired through one's work unit. Rental payments were lower than one's electric bill. Guangzhou's population was concentrated in four urban districts: Liwan, Yuexiu, and Dongshan on the north bank of the Pearl River and Haizhu, opposite them on the south bank. Water buffalo still ploughed the fields in many parts of Haizhu, the least developed of the four districts.
By the beginning of the 21st century China's cities were unrecognizable. So much construction, both residential and commercial, had occurred (and was still underway) that people claimed the crane had become the national bird. In Guangzhou average per capita living space had more than tripled, reaching 13.87 square meters by 2001 (Guangzhou Shi Tongji Ju 2002: 207). Decorating and furnishing one's home has become a national obsession: lighting fixtures, moulded ceilings, kitchen tiles, artificial wood floors, western-style bathrooms, doors and door grates, leather sofas, dining room sets, space allocation all evoke endless fascination as friends and neighbors exchange visits and the latest consumer information (Davis 2002; Fraser 2000). High-rises dominate the skyline, and, in once rural areas of Guangzhou, gated communities with status-evoking names (in English!) such as Galloper Garden, Home of Manager, and Rome Villa, were carved out of the rice fields and sport such amenities as underground parking, swimming pools, and clubhouses. Old neighborhoods continue to exist but are undergoing extensive redevelopment and the break up of established social networks as their long-term residents scatter, sometimes for good. Housing has ceased to be a welfare benefit. Newcomers to the labor force are required to find and preferably to purchase housing on their own. Older workers have become owners too, in most cases by purchasing their currently occupied apartments at tremendous discounts as the state sold off its housing stock. In 1993 62% of Guangzhou's residents rented public housing while 8% rented private housing; by the end of 2001 these percentages had dropped to 19.2% and 1.4%, respectively. Conversely, home ownership rates jumped from 30% in 1993 to 79.4% in 2001 (Guangzhou Shi Tongji Ju 1994:353 and 2002: 196). The initial relatively high rate of private ownership (for urban China) was due to the special protection afforded to housing built in the pre-war era by remittances from abroad. As a result of all the new construction the city's population has spread way beyond the boundaries of the original four urban districts, engulfing rural villages in Tianhe District to the east and Baiyun District to the north. Haizhu District has filled in, and two other districts, Fangcun and Huangpu, are now also officially classified as urban.
This paper will examine two related issues (1): the process by which this remarkable transformation has occurred and (2) the nature of its social effects, specifically, the impact of the redistribution of Guangzhou's population on the support networks of its older residents. The primary data derive from a longitudinal study that the author has been conducting in Guangzhou since 1987. (1)
The total sample consists of 300 households, 200 initially contacted in 1987 with the survivors followed up in 1991 and 1998 and 100 recruited into the study from the same neighbor hoods in 1998. The households were randomly selected from list-outs obtained from the local police stations (which maintain the household registration system). In 1987 each selected household contained at least one member 70 years of age or older living in one of two neighborhoods in either Yuexiu or Dongshan District. In 1998 the age range was restricted to those in their 70s to make up for the aging of the initial sample. Both of the research sites are located on the north bank of the Pearl River, the historic heart of the city. Yuexiu contains the seats of both the provincial and city governments while Dongshan is home to several revolutionary monuments and is famous for the quality of its middle schools and its high proportion of families with Huaqiao (Overseas Chinese) connections. The two neighborhoods were selected to assure a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds, and the elders, who are the focus of the research, range from the illiterate to upper middle school (a level equivalent to high school in the United States) and college graduates and from one-time pedicab drivers and laborers to retired teachers and high level government workers.
The Transformation of Guangzhou
According to the China City Statistical Yearbook (2003: 459) Guangzhou had an urban population of 5,769,700 in 2001, making it the sixth most populous city in China behind Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Wuhan, and Tianjin and just ahead of Shenyang, Xian, and Hangzhou. Along with the Special Economic Zones set up in coastal Guangdong and Fujian Provinces, Guangzhou received permission from the central government in the early 1980s to solicit foreign investment and develop the private sector of the economy. (For an introduction to local history, see Cheong 1997; Downs 1997; Rhoads 1974; Tsin 1999, 2000; Vogel 1969, and Wakeman 1966. For an introduction to Maoist [1949-1976] and contemporary Guangzhou and to the special circumstances that favored the city's rapid development during the post-Mao era, see Cheng 2000; Ikels 1996, 2002; Li and Yang 2003; Vogel 1989; Whyte and Parish 1984; Yeung and Chu 1998.) Foreign investment was expected to come primarily from "compatriots" (Chinese living in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) and from Overseas Chinese (meaning people of Chinese ancestry living in other locations such as Southeast Asia, the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe). To convince these potential investors that their property rights would be respected, the local government began to restore ownership rights in housing that had been taken over early in the Maoist era. (For a fuller discussion of housing policy in China as a whole and in Guangzhou, its implementation, and its shortcomings, see Chan et al. 2003; Dai 1999; Davis 2003; Hin 1999; Hui and Seabrooke 2000; Hui and Wong 1999; Ikels 1996; Lai 1998; Li 2003; Shaw 1997; Wang 2003; Wang and Murie 1999).
The Restoration of Property Rights
As indicated above historically a large proportion of housing in Guangzhou and in the research neighborhoods had been purchased with foreign exchange and was owned by the families of Overseas Chinese. Coastal Guangdong was the place of origin of the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to North America from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. These mainly male immigrants lived as cheaply as they could and sent the bulk of their earnings back to China (Chen 1939; Hsu 2000; Mei 1979; Siu 1987). While most of these funds were used for immediate consumption, including the construction of housing, the surplus was frequently used for philanthropic purposes. It was this tradition of cash flows that the post-Mao economic reformers hoped to restore and to redirect into investment. Technically private owners (not just families of Overseas Chinese) had retained ownership of their dwellings even after the Communist Revolution. However, they could not exercise these rights. Instead they were allowed to continue occupying part of their dwellings while any "excess" space became available for rental. The Municipal Housing Management Bureau (HMB) in conjunction with work units lacking access to housing for their employees determined the space available for rental and the amount of rent and assigned the tenants. In pre-housing reform China the sole factor determining the amount of rent a household paid was the amount of space occupied, i.e., a flat per square meter rate applied city-wide. Location did not count, nor age nor quality of building, nor view, nor floor, nor surrounding amenities, such as roads or access to shops or parks. The only relevant characteristic of the renter to play a role in rental amount was workplace status, e.g., high ranked officials frequently had the rents of their outsized apartments additionally subsidized; income differentials, however, were disregarded.
In the first phase of the restoration of property rights owners were allowed to recover and occupy their property themselves. Sitting tenants, however, had rights too. They could not simply be thrown out of homes to which they had legitimately been assigned and for which they had been paying rent for decades. In theory the work unit of one of the household members had to accept the responsibility of relocating the family. If, for some reason, the family could not be relocated, the owner was eventually allowed to require the tenants to sign a lease and at the end of each lease period to increase the rent a prescribed modest percentage. New tenants (those coming on their own to rent space after property rights had been restored) became subject to market conditions, i.e., the rent was set by the landlord subject to the principle of supply and demand. Under this regime rents understandably increased. In 1987 the original households in this study had paid an average (mean) monthly rent of 8.65 yuan (slightly more than US$2 at the then exchange rate). In 1998 the remaining households were paying an average of 135.69 yuan a month (about US$16 at the then exchange rate). The respective medians were 7 and 60, reflecting the new open-endedness of the upper limit.
The transition from housing as a welfare guarantee to housing as a market commodity has not been easy. As the cases below demonstrate, tenants have experienced tremendous uncertainties, and even as late as 1998 owners were still...
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