This paper explains the development of the urban housing system in China from 1949 to 2011 with an emphasis on the factors driving housing inequality in each policy period. We argue that the logic underpinning the housing policy had shifted from socialist redistribution to the stimulation of growth in the process of market economy reform and has been shifting toward social inclusionary growth since the 2010s. Over the course of time, two institutional factors (work units and household registration/hukou) have played a key role in determining individual households’ housing opportunities. The role of the work units has gradually waned since the 2000s, but the hukou system continues to be important. In the last part of the paper, we set forth the latest changes in Chinese housing policy. Since 2011, the central government has been striving toward a more comprehensive system of housing provision with the aim of making the housing market more inclusive (though not necessarily more equal). Finally, we express concern about an emerging though embedded source of housing inequality: the unequal distribution of family wealth.@en

After three decades of housing reform in China, housing assets constitute a sizable share of family wealth but are distributed unevenly, as registered homeowners are predominantly male. This is partly because males generally have higher incomes than females and can therefore contribute more to the financing, but also because males receive more intergenerational transfers. On the basis of 31 in-depth interviews from Chongqing, this article seeks to answer two questions: (1) How and why does the gender of the recipient affect the negotiation of intergenerational transfers? and (2) What are young women’s possibilities to accumulate housing assets? The research findings show that young women either ask their parents for help to secure housing assets before marriage or they attempt to co-own a home with their husbands after marriage. Women who do not succeed in either of these strategies do not accumulate housing assets and thereby risk their rights to the home if their marriage is dissolved.@en

In China’s past decades of marketization reforms, original urban dwellers and early settlers in the home ownership sector enjoyed a drastic improvement in living conditions and family wealth stored in properties. Despite their significant contribution to the urban economy, rural migrants benefited far less from the housing market growth. Institutional discrimination, such as duality in welfare state provisions due to hukou segregation is often seen as main the mechanism behind this urban-rural discrepancy. With three elaborated case studies ofgenerational housing pathways from Chongqing, this paper contributes to the debate of urban-rural housing inequality from a longitudinal perspective, focusing on the role of intergenerational transfers of wealth. We find that the original hukou, the original place of living and the housing positions of the parents all have great influence on the younger generation’s housing experiences. The gaps between the urban locals and the migrants in housing resulted from generational accumulations of unbalanced opportunities in accessing housing.@en

The inquiry that has culminated in this thesis was inspired by the challenges that many young Chinese people were facing when trying to gain access to affordable housing at the time of study, the early 2010s. By then, more than thirty years of housing reforms had completely changed how housing was being provided in China. The resulting structure had led young people to access housing in ways that were very different from those of their parents’ generation (Deng, Hoekstra & Elsinga, 2017). These observations prompted the following research question: What are the key factors defining young people’s opportunity to access housing, and how do these factors relate to China’s institutional changes during and after the market reform? The ensuing research has demonstrated that parental resources and intergenerational reciprocity are indispensable to the housing opportunity of young people, as home ownership has come to mediate the exchange of resources between...@en