Mobilising the welfare machine: Questioning the resurgent socialist concern in China’s Public Rental Housing Scheme

Abstract

This study examined the resurgence of public housing provision in China since 2007 by situating it in a broad welfare regime analysis. Based on insights from Productivist Welfare Capitalism (Holliday, 2000. Productivist Welfare Capitalism, 706‒723) and Graduated Sovereignty (Ong, 2006a. Neoliberalism as exception), we have sought to shed new light on the productivist approach through a study on Chinese cases. Using the examples of Chongqing and Nanjing, we argue in the study that the proactive action of the state to further commodify labour power has led to the flexible de‐articulation and re‐articulation of welfare and citizenship in an ongoing process of de‐territorialisation and re‐territorialisation of various segments of the population that own parcels of land. Another aspect of flexibility in the welfare regime is the double segmentation of population and territory, which is also contingent on, and subject to, alteration upon government decision.

Housing (de-)financialisation under state entrepreneurialism in China: The revival of affordable housing and Shanghai’s shared-ownership housing scheme

“…Lastly, rental schemes represent the state’s efforts to de-financialise housing to secure the reproduction of labour and maintain social stability. Public rental housing (PRH) targets specific pools of labour, thus meeting the needs of local economic development (Wang and Li, 2019). In order to support economic upgrading, this scheme has been widely used by governments in coastal cities to attract young, educated talents.…”

Social factory as prosaic state space: Redefining labour in China’s mass innovation/mass entrepreneurship campaign

“…The attention to the human quality of maker-entrepreneurs explains the involvement of governmental departments on budget allocation and human-resource management, public universities, as well as the state-supported quasi third sector such as the Chinese Communist Youth League, United Front, All-China Women's Federation and China's Disabled Persons' Federation, among others. The mass entrepreneurship campaign in China is concerned with forming a new system to revalue existing labour and to mobilise their selftransformation (Wang and Y. Li, 2017;Wang and Y. Li, 2018;Wang and M. Li, 2019). The new constellation of political apparatus operates to objectify the 'mass' in the construction of mass entrepreneurship and, more importantly, to move further to unleash actions at the body level.…”