Abstract
Urbanization and its externalities present some of the most pressing issues for the current leadership of the People’s Republic of China. A growing literature examines the contest over property rights in China’s cities as the real estate market exacerbates social inequalities. In Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao offers, with remarkable detail, the struggles of evictees against commercial developers and the local government in Shanghai. Alternatively gripping and painful, thoroughly honest and, at times, impassioned and even humorous, Qin’s account provides the closest approximation available to a record of socio-legal cases or textual documentation of housing disputes in urbanizing China.
Qin applies the concept ‘domicide’ as ‘“the murder of the house” against the owner’s will’ (p. 2), derived from John Douglas Porteous and Sandra Eileen Smith’s Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), to examine five contests between residents and colluding developers and district governments. While Qin steers clear of heavy theorization and instead concentrates on the empirics of eviction, through her case material, she demonstrates the ways in which home is saturated with meanings, both material and affective. As home is tied to kin, family, career, and sense of self, its destruction uproots more than the physical remains of apartment foundations. Facing corruption, weak rule of law and arbitrary enforcement, and the government’s monomania for development, residents encounter the almost impossible task of protecting their property rights. Specifically, Qin shows how the law itself encodes pro-development interests and disadvantages urban residents (pp. 9–10, 45).
The Introduction situates Qin’s study in Shanghai’s development and, more broadly, the emergence of a commercial real estate market in the 1980s. Qin next assesses the various means of grass-roots resistance including mobilizing the law, petitions, using the language of the Chinese Communist Party, and invoking the discourse of ‘historic preservation’. Chapter 1 introduces readers to the challenges of the petition system through the case of Zhou Youlan, a ‘full-time petitioner’ (p. 40). Zhou challenged the demolition of her apartment on grounds of inadequate compensation and began a decade-long saga to petition her case. Chapter 2 depicts the trials of a Chinese Muslim family as it tried to save its multi-generational home from destruction by a Hong Kong developer. Chapter 3 is the story of East Eights Lots, located in another high-value area of Shanghai. In this case, the district government sold land use rights to the developer for no cost, which the residents challenged through litigation and using media. Chapter 4 shows an instance of a non-propertied family who lived in a self-made house. Teacher Li, a barefoot lawyer (赤脚律师), strove to understand the relevant law, the real estate market, and social connections – all of which he manipulated to obtain a land use permit. Using the language of the law, Teacher Li bolstered his and his neighbours’ claims through petitioning. Chapter 5 shows both evictees and the government making arguments based on pretexts. The district government claimed demolition was necessary for a public project, but was in fact removing residents for a commercial development. Residents appropriated the language of historic preservation to invent a tradition – that their neighbourhood was named after President Abraham Lincoln – and garner domestic and international media attention. The conclusion assesses contemporary China as liminal and transitional. Reform China features residents making use of this liminality by mobilizing communist songs, Chinese poetry, new media, state socialist law, and social connections to accomplish their respective goals (e.g. compensation, an apology, or restoration of their home).
In Shanghai Gone, Qin shows the dramatis personae of China’s urbanization: ‘nail houses’ (钉子户), real estate tycoons, corrupt officials, social media gurus, lawyers, and policy entrepreneurs. Qin’s focus throughout is on the human face of disputes over homes and their loss. Qin describes residents and families holding out in half-demolished homes, strategizing in poorly lit makeshift conference rooms, and grabbing window bars in a last effort to secure their home.
Qin’s methodology, including oral history, interviews, reproduction of material her interlocutors generated, and long-term relationships with residents, achieves her goal of depicting the human element in such disputes. Conducting fieldwork on housing disputes is exceptionally difficult work – logistically and ethically. Qin’s role is as much one of an activist as it is academic: as evictees seek to make known their cases, Qin’s study is one such venue for publicizing their stories. The result is largely one-sided, an issue of representation which Qin acknowledges (p. 30). While property conflicts are characterized by power asymmetry, lionizing residents arrives at too facile analyses. To her credit, Qin shows that residents also take advantage of loopholes in the law, for instance, adding space to their homes to increase amounts of compensation. Chapter 4 shows Teacher Shi engaging in many such illegal strategies.
Qin’s book is a testament to tenacity in research methods and goals, just as it is to the struggles of her informants. It sets a bar for empirical fieldwork on political issues in contemporary China. Students and scholars of modern history, urban studies, law and society, and anthropology will find in Shanghai Gone a vivid account of the best and worst in reform-era China.