Urban villagers as real estate developers: embracing property mind through ‘planting’ housing in North-east China

Abstract

Urban village collectives, as one of the stakeholders of land requisition and development in urbanized China, have gradually been driven into real estate development. This transformation has raised an important question regarding how villagers develop their 'property mind'. From 2015 to 2017, guided by an abductive institutional economics approach, which holds both original and new institutional economics in dialogue, we addressed this question by conducting fieldwork in Xiaojia village, Northeast China. In Northeast China, unlike in the southern cities, there was no foreign investment and the population was in decline. Nevertheless, the villagers developed housing, first for their own use and then for the market. The resulting evidence indicates the following: 1) property rights are social relations and constructed socially and institutionally; 2) markets are not independent, they are conditioned by the institutional context.

Urban Village Shareholding: Cooperative Economic Organization in Northeast China

“…This cooperation was based on kinship as well as a shared environment, since a traditional Chinese village is understood as a ritual and historical unit (Feuchtwang 1998). It is also a collective composed of influential informal networks, such as acquaintance and economic relations (Sa 2020). However, the establishment of cooperatives brought about the conversion of land and equipment from private ownership to collective ownership.…”

“…I have criticized the preference for private property rights in China as well. Well‐defined property rights are not a panacea for solving problems of land ownership, and ambiguous property rights, such as collective property rights, can establish a different logic—a collective logic—of land use (Sa 2020). Previous studies have not explored why villagers who used to rely on farming have started to give up farming and become involved in the real estate industry instead.…”

“…Previous studies have not explored why villagers who used to rely on farming have started to give up farming and become involved in the real estate industry instead. To fill in this research gap, Sa and Haila (2021) explain how urban villagers develop “property minds.” The role of collectively owned shareholding cooperatives still remains unclear, and we need to clarify it. It plays a crucial role in land development during the era of land requisition and the attending dislocation that is inevitable in contemporary China.…”

Pinball Wizard

“…Like all societies pre-modern communities themselves evolve. The land economist Anne Haila developed the concept of ‘the property mind’ to describe the rapid learning of Chinese small farmers concerning property development opportunities on their land (Sa and Haila, 2021). That learning is not limited to China, for in Vancouver an unexpected transformation is occurring.…”

Metaphor, Materialism, Metropolis

“…Uneven yet insistently transnationalizing real estate states rely on, and reproduce, recombinant legitimations of diaspora and nativism, capital and consciousness, property and personhood, ancestry and amortization. Generational processes of collective-competitive dialectics of urban capital accumulation take one form as ‘urban villagers’ become rentiers and landlords in the ‘ultra ownership society’ rapidly produced in the planet's largest urban system (Huang, He and Gan, 2021; Sa and Haila, 2023). They surface in different ways in the hyper-exploitation of migrant labour to manufacture nationalist consent stored in luxury cathedrals of greenwashed sustainability – ‘glass refrigerators in the desert’ – in Gulf autocracies (Koch, 2014).…”