Housing Improvement and Distribution in Urban China: Initial Evidence from China's 2000 Census

Wang Feng

《The China Review An Interdisciplinary Journal on Greater China》 3卷2期 (2003/11) Pp. 121-143

摘要

China's 2000 census contains many innovative new components that can be used for examining recent social changes in China. Of particular importance are items related to housing, which represented no fewer than fifteen questions in the census questionnaires. In a sharp contrast to China's planned economy era, when the government was virtually the sole source of urban housing and when housing shortage prevailed, changing housing conditions in the 1990s illustrate important improvement in the standard of living. Moreover, changing sources of housing and housing distribution reveal important features of a post-socialist social stratification regime, in terms of welfare redistribution and wealth accumulation. Relying on official Chinese statistics, this paper reports improvements in housing conditions and changes in housing-related expenditure for urban Chinese in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Relying on initial tabulations of the 2000 census, this paper also examines in a preliminary way the emerging pattern of urban economic inequality as seen in the distributions of housing conditions and housing ownership following recent reforms in public housing.